Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern!

In Tuesday’s briefing a federal court verdict turns a case involving a Russian oligarch on its head, and we look into the challenges of defending human rights in Russia.

© Keystone / Urs Flueeler

In the news:  The world’s steepest cog-wheel railway, running up to the Pilatus mountain in central Switzerland, has been kitted out with new railcars.

• The eight new cars will replace the previous ones dating from the 1930s and 1960s, the Pilatus Railway company said today. The company plans to have them in service in time for the 2023 summer season (the rail line up to the 2,132-metre Pilatus summit runs from May to November).
• Swiss Helicopter has won this year’s “Devil’s Stone” award, given to individuals or companies who harm the Alpine environment. The company’s heliskiing service makes too much noise, frightens wildlife and emits far too much CO2, said the Alpine Initiative AssociationExternal link.
• Chief financial officers are more pessimistic about the economic outlook for Switzerland than they were six months ago, according to a survey. However, a majority of the 127 managers believed that their companies would experience growth in the near future.
• The Nobel Prize in Physics headed to the US, France and AustriaExternal link this morning. Tomorrow it will be the turn of Swiss chemists to wait by the phone.

Keystone / Karl Mathis

A federal court has ruled that Swiss authorities should no longer provide legal assistance to Russia in an ongoing probe into embezzlement. Assets linked to the case, frozen in Geneva, are also to be released.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reportsExternal link that the case marks a “legal turning point” sparked by the ongoing Russian military aggression in Ukraine. In effect, the rulingExternal link by the Federal Administrative Court (dated August 30, 2022) brings to an end several years of cooperation by Swiss authorities in the case of a banking oligarch who Moscow suspected of embezzling money abroad.

After Zurich investigators signalled to Russian authorities in 2019 that they were looking into a possible case of money laundering involving the Ananyev brothers – founders of the Promsvyazbank bank in the 1990s – Moscow officially submitted a request for legal assistance. Since the bank had been nationalised in 2017, Russia had been investigating the brothers (and others) for suspected embezzlement of up to $1.4 billion (CHF1.38 billion).

In 2020, after the involvement of the Swiss justice ministry, a Geneva account controlled by Dmitri Ananyev and his wife was frozen, and remained so until now despite various appeals. Now, however, the verdict by the federal court turns the case on its head: not only should Swiss authorities not provide legal assistance to Russia, but the frozen funds should also be released, it said – against the wishes of Swiss justice authorities.

In its explanation of the verdict, the court said the attack on Ukraine, as well as Russia’s increasing isolation from international institutions like the UN Charter and the Council of Europe, means that “Russia no longer offers any guarantee that it could respect its contractual obligations under international law”. 

Judges also underlined that the Promsvyazbank bank is the target of EU and Swiss sanctions, and that it “receives direct instructions from Russian President Vladimir Putin”. As such, the court said, the bank has a part of responsibility for the current destabilisation in Eastern Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea.

swissinfo.ch

In the latest Inside Geneva podcast, host Imogen Foulkes looks at the issue of defending human rights in Russia.

“Right now, in Russia there are few means left to defend human rights and to address human rights violations. It’s really hard,” says Violetta Fitsner, a Russian human rights defender, in the podcast.

“Excluding Russia from various organisations: Council of Europe, Human Rights Council. Are you isolating them from all concepts like universal human rights?” asks analyst Daniel Warner.

“We want to ensure that the Russian human rights community feels part of the universal human rights movement,” says Gerald Staberock, secretary general of the World Organisation Against Torture.