Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern,

Dealing with China is a “balancing act”, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis said today. In private, Western politicians probably use other words. But do Switzerland’s economic interests with its third-largest trading partner trump human rights?

Keystone / Laurent Gillieron

In the News:  Switzerland has dropped one spot, to 15th, in an annual league table ranking 60 countries according to their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Climate experts blamed the failure of the CO2 law at the ballot box in June for Switzerland’s fall in the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) which was published today. Switzerland did well in the Emissions and Energy Use categories and was ranked medium in Renewable Energy; it stumbled in Climate Policy, where it dropped 11 places.
• The Covid-19 pandemic led to a decline in almost all indicators of museum activityExternal link in Switzerland in 2020 compared with the previous year. It affected the number of events (down 62%), the number of guided visits (down 54%) and the number of admissions (down 43%). However, the health crisis did encourage museums to develop their online content: 40% of them became more active on their websites and 36% more active on social media.
• Isn’t there any good news? Well there is for Volkswagen. Six years after the German car manufacturer got caught up in a diesel scandalExternal link, the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland today said it planned to drop proceedingsExternal link because it hadn’t been able to pin down any culprits so far. This sent the wrong signal, complained the consumer watchdog.

© Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

How should a small country like Switzerland play its cards with a superpower like China? Does it even have any cards?

Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis today addressed the challenge of dealing with a country which doesn’t believe in human rights or democracy but which is your third-largest trading partner.

“It’s a balancing act,” he admitted in an interviewExternal link with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “We want to take a special path that lets us hold summit meetings in Geneva like the one between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin or peace talks. We cannot play the role of bridge-builder if we always sing along in the chorus with other countries.”

He was indirectly referring to human rights sanctions imposed on China by the European Union in March. Shouldn’t Switzerland, a country which claims to have a history of supporting human rights, back the EU? Cassis didn’t leave much doubt about what he thought of the EU’s human rights sanctions.

“From a foreign policy perspective, the question is whether Switzerland wants to continue to play a role as an honest broker or whether it automatically wants to follow the EU. For me, the answer is clearly the first.”

Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

“The Swiss are coming!” Six planes carrying just under 1,800 passengers flew from Switzerland to the United States yesterday, the first day for almost 20 months that many non-Americans could enter the US.

All the flights – to New York JFK, Newark, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami – were pretty much full, Meike Fuhlrott, a spokeswoman for Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS), said today.

“The booking situation for the coming weeks is developing very positively,” she said, although she pointed out that the period around Christmas and the New Year was generally a time of particularly high demand. “It should also be taken into account that SWISS will only be offering around half of its pre-crisis capacity by the end of the year.”

Like all airlines, SWISS had been hit really hard by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since yesterday morning fully vaccinated European citizens have been allowed to enter the US. Previously a special permit from the US government was required to do so. Despite the entry ban, US citizens, spouses of US citizens, diplomats and people from various non-EU nations had been allowed to fly into the country.

Non-vaccinated foreign nationals may enter the US only if they meet certain criteria for exceptional cases and undertake to undergo a Covid test, go into quarantine and be vaccinated upon arrival. In addition, travellers must provide personal information so that they remain accessible to authorities.