Swiss asylum centres deal with rise in security incidents
The number of security-related incidents in federal asylum centres reached a new high last year in Switzerland.
The number of incidents has doubled since 2020, rising from 672 incidents that year to 1368 cases in 2023, according to the Sunday weekly NZZ am Sonntag, which cited official figures.
The State Secretariat for Migration pointed out that these are absolute figures and that the incidents per overnight stay have decreased.
According to the newspaper, security-related incidents range from arguments to harassment and assault. According to the migration authoritis, 70% of incidents were caused by asylum-seekers from North Africa.
Asylum applications from this region have increased sharply since 2021 and are usually rejected.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.