Swiss Gaza flotilla members contest government bill for consular aid

The Swiss government has asked Swiss members of the Gaza flotilla to pay a range of costs. Keystone / Pierre Albouy

The Swiss foreign ministry has called on Swiss members of the Gaza flotilla to reimburse the cost for consular protection and emergency services provided by the government. The flotilla members had been arrested and imprisoned by Israel in October while attempting to break the humanitarian blockade.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) is charging Swiss nationals administrative and emergency costs of between CHF300 ($372) and CHF1,047. A total of 19 participants in “Waves of Freedom” and one in “Thousand Madleens to Gaza” are affected by these bills.

According to the FDFA, the difference in amounts reflects the workload involved in providing consular protection to each citizen: interventions with the Israeli authorities, prison visits of varying lengths, and availability and assistance on returning to Switzerland.

A bill deemed incomprehensible

Sébastien Dubugnon was part of the group expelled to Turkey. It was Turkey, not Switzerland, that paid for their plane ticket home. However, his bill for administrative costs amounted to CHF300. It’s a sum he finds incomprehensible, because in his view Switzerland didn’t help them at all.

On Wednesday on Swiss public radio, RTS, he explained that the only consular intervention he was entitled to was a ten-minute visit to the prison. “We saw a consular representative who was literally fired after a very short time, without even seeing half of us. And he told us he couldn’t help us either,” he points out.

Feeling abandoned by the government

He adds that he “never had any contact with consular assistance in Switzerland, either on arrival in Geneva, or by telephone, or anything at all”.

He believes that the CHF300 claimed does not reflect any real assistance, and questions the lack of a precise breakdown. For him, his experience in Turkey is akin to “total abandonment” by the Swiss government.

The members of the flotilla have 30 days to pay their bills, but they have announced that they will appeal.

Translated from French by SRG automatic translation/jdp

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].