Bern and Vienna vow to boost cooperation on migrants and terrorism

Ministers from the two countries met in Vienna, vowing to step up negotiations on a bilateral agreement for returning migrants to their first port of call. Keystone / Robert Jaeger

Switzerland and Austria want to strengthen cooperation on migration and security, they said on Tuesday.

This came at a meeting in Vienna between Swiss Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter and her new Austrian counterpart Gerhard Karner. Their talks focused on European moves to revise the so-called Schengen rules on border controls, ongoing European Union negotiations to reform Europe’s migration and asylum system, and bilateral cooperation on migration and counter-terrorism, according to a Swiss government press releaseExternal link.

Since mid-2021, more than 5,000 refugees have entered eastern Switzerland illegally by train from Austria, mostly young Afghans with France as their destination. Most of the refugees have applied for asylum in Austria, meaning that Switzerland can theoretically send them back. But this rarely happens, according to the Swiss news agency Keystone-SDA, because of long procedures and the lack of detention facilities. Almost all of them disappear within a short time and travel on.

Switzerland’s goal is to speed up the procedures and send more refugees back to Austria, according to Keller-Sutter. Negotiations between the two countries to revise a bilateral “readmission agreement” have been under way since 2019 and need to be stepped up, she told the press. Karner said the two countries had agreed in principle that work on this must be intensified but that there were still “open legal questions”.

The ministers also agreed on the need for bilateral cooperation in the fight against terrorism. The November 2020 terrorist attack in Vienna is a good example, when cooperation between Switzerland and Austria “rapidly bore fruit”, says the Swiss press release. Just one day later, Swiss police arrested two people who had visited the terrorist in Vienna. “Without this close cooperation installed under Schengen, such rapid assistance would have been unthinkable,” it adds.