Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
As we know, artificial intelligence can help with writing complex texts. Swiss courts are now noticing this too – mainly because they are on the receiving end of page-long complaints of questionable legal quality. How they are coping with the influx can be read in today’s briefing.
Warm regards from Bern.
Thanks to AI, legal laypeople can suddenly appear to become experts. But for courts, this means one thing above all – more work.
Have you ever turned to AI to write a difficult email? ChatGPT and similar such tools can turn a few simple thoughts into eloquent texts without requiring much knowledge of the content. The legal system in Zurich is now feeling the effects of this too, as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reports today.
Judge André Moser, president of the canton’s administrative court, tells the paper how he used to get “linguistically clumsy letters”, some handwritten. Today, he increasingly receives page-long, linguistically flawless texts. The polished legal German sounds professional, but the complaints are unnecessarily long and peppered with numerous irrelevant arguments, he adds. Some contain unfounded accusations and can trigger additional procedural steps. Yet the court must read and examine all these texts – right down to the last footnote.
Why not simply use AI for this too? “It cannot be that in the end it comes down to AI against AI,” Moser says. Official secrecy rules also prohibit the use of regular AI tools, although there are efforts to create a protected AI environment. Meanwhile, anyone who uses AI to write a particularly hefty complaint also risks a hefty bill: in two cases, the Zurich administrative court has already imposed increased procedural fees – in one case, over CHF3,000 ($3,620).
In 2015, Céline Amaudruz helped Guy Parmelin’s entry into the Swiss government. Now the Swiss People’s Party politician from Geneva wants to take his place.
On Tuesday, this briefing reported on debates in Switzerland about whether motherhood is compatible with the role of a government minister in Switzerland. Now Céline Amaudruz, who was at the centre of those discussions, has officially submitted her candidacy.
The 47-year-old Swiss People’s Party politician from Geneva has been a member of the House of Representatives since 2011; she has been vice-president of the People’s Party since 2016. Coming from a wealthy family of lawyers, she studied law herself and worked for the UBS and Julius Bär banks, among others. She is seen as economically liberal and is situated on the right-wing side of her – already right-wing – party.
Amaudruz has a close relationship with outgoing minister Guy Parmelin: in 2015, she was the campaign manager of his efforts to gain a ministerial seat himself. And according to the NZZ, the two maintain an almost familial relationship to this day. She enjoys support in the French-speaking regions of Switzerland, but her backing within the German-speaking sections of the People’s Party is shakier.
Since 1970, French-speaking Switzerland has always been represented by at least two members in the Federal Council. Whether Amaudruz will be nominated will be decided by the People’s Party parliamentary group at the end of November.
A new study shows that young women in Switzerland have caught up somewhat with men in terms of pay. However, the income gap between the sexes remains large, particularly among parents.
Do women in Switzerland earn less than men? The answer is complex. A new study now shows that the gap has narrowed considerably, especially for young women, the Tages-Anzeiger reports.
The study shows that women have largely been able to catch up in the labour market over the past 30 years. For those born in 1965, the employment rate of young women was still 22 percentage points behind that of men; for those born in 1995, this gap has almost completely closed. The difference in weekly hours worked between men and women also shrank from 17 to less than four. And women have also caught up significantly in terms of wages: the difference in hourly wages is now less than 5%, and for total gross earned income it is 14%. One reason for this is women’s rising level of education, according to one of the study’s authors.
According to the authors, Switzerland even performs better than Sweden, known for its gender equality, when it comes to the gender pay gap. However, there is a caveat; most of the people examined in the study do not – yet – have children. Among parents, the differences remain striking: mothers born in 1995 earn on average 51% less than fathers. This compares total earned income, which also includes different working hours.
Was China behind the recent cyberattack on Swiss space company Beyond Gravity? Research by SRF suggests this may have been the case.
At the start of October, the space company Beyond Gravity, which is owned by the Swiss federal government, was the victim of a cyberattack. Now research by SRF shows who might be behind it: according to several people in the know, Beyond Gravity and the federal government assume Chinese involvement. However, the suspicion is not officially confirmed.
There is also no official details about what information was stolen. However, the president of the oversight committee in the Swiss Senate confirmed that data was leaked. Space has long been in the focus of intelligence services, says Ralph Weber, a professor at the University of Basel who researches Chinese intelligence services. “We often imagine that large technologies have to be stolen,” he told SRF. But espionage is often also about obtaining details which seem insignificant in themselves but which can be of importance to an intelligence service.
How is Switzerland now reacting to the cyberattack? If hard evidence of Chinese origin was available, the goverment would have to weigh up how to respond. But the reaction would probably be restrained and discreet, according to Weber, because Switzerland has other interests, such as the free trade agreement that both countries want to sign soon.
Translated from German, sub-edited by Domhnall O’Sullivan
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