Media investigation targets activities of Swiss intelligence services
Switzerland’s secret service is facing renewed criticism due to its data collection practices concerning political parties and civil organisations.
The Green PartyExternal link and the non-governmental Public EyeExternal link organisation said the Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) confirmed last month that it had gathered nearly 150 reports on the left-wing party and its president as well as 430 entries about the NGO..
Both organisations asked the FIS last June about possible documents related to them.
The Green Party and Public Eye have accused the FIS of illegal activities, but the government agency dismissed the criticism as unfounded.
The FIS said political groups were not the target of its activities but that a mention of their names in security documents might be due to them being cited in press reports in connection with other relevant issues.
Deleting data
The FIS also stressed it made efforts to clear out its data collections and had deleted more than 4.5 million documents since 2020. The request for information by the Greens and Public Eye came at a time when this process “had not yet been finished”.
Parliamentary and security watchdogs in the past repeatedly reprimanded the FIS for its data collection practices.
The discovery at the end of the 1980s of secret service files on around a million individuals and groups in Switzerland caused a major political uproar at the time.
The latest revelations were published on Wednesday after research by online publication Republik and public broadcaster SRF.
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.