Switzerland Today

Hello from Lausanne!

With Switzerland still in the grip of winter, I can't see many plants spreading right now. But did you know that invasive, non-native plants are climbing up the mountains, thanks to global warming and transport networks?

As we think of people in Ukraine, it's also Holocaust Remembrance Day when we remember the horrors of the Second World War. 

Here's my pick of the day's news:

Are Switzerland’s supermarket giants unfairly pushing up their margins on organic produce? © Keystone / Christian Beutler

In the News: Organic food mark-ups, alien plants climbing mountains, and more reaction to Switzerland’s ban on re-export of Swiss arms to Ukraine.

• Are big Swiss retailers charging too high prices for organic produce? The price watchdog has entered into a row with them, accusing them of just that. Stefan Meierhans released a report on Friday complaining that supermarkets are failing to cooperate with his investigation and withholding data. Meierhans suspects that some retailers are ramping up the cost of organic foods to unacceptable levels of up to 30%. The price watchdog chief wants this reduced to a maximum of 20%. He proposes new Swiss regulations, similar to those adopted by New Zealand, to prevent retailers from excessively marking up organic food prices. 
• Invasive non-native plant species have been moving up the Swiss Alps in recent years, owing to climate change and transport networks. Researchers are surprised at the speed of colonisation by non-native flora, which was measured at 16% growth over a ten-year observation period, in common with other alpine regions around the world. A global study led by the federal technology institute ETH Zurich concentrated research along roads and other transport routes. Alien flora has a better chance of thriving along roadsides and rail tracks where the habitat has been disturbed to the point that native plants have less chance of seeing off the new competitors.
• Germany is not angry at Switzerland’s refusal to allow re-export of Swiss-made ammunition to Ukraine, claims the German ambassador to Bern. But it is clearly not happy, and is ramping up the pressure for a change in this rule, which Bern says is to safeguard Swiss neutrality. “We are only talking about re-exports of ammunition produced in Switzerland and bought by Germany 20 years ago, for anti-aircraft and therefore defensive systems,” ambassador Michael Flügger told Swiss newspapers. “Nobody was asking Switzerland to deliver arms to Ukraine.”
• Swiss parliamentarian Damien Cottier, who heads the Council of Europe’s legal affairs and human rights commission, is calling for a “new Nuremberg” for Ukraine. This comes after the Council of Europe called on Thursday for a special international tribunal to try the Russian and Belarussian leaders for aggression in Ukraine. “If we do not judge the concept of the crime of aggression, we are only doing half the job. It’s like trying only half the criminals,” Cottier said in an interview with RTSExternal link on Friday. The special court should not be created in Ukraine, because there would be “an impression of bias”, and the immunity of heads of state can only be lifted by the international community, he told RTS.

Children behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, the day the camp was liberated. Keystone

Jews who witnessed and survived the Holocaust are dying. But as we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, a digital exhibition keeps their testimonies alive.

The exhibition that inspired Katharina Hardy’s bookThe Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors has been travelling around the world since 2017 and is now available digitallyExternal link, reports SWI swissinfo’s David Eugster. Holocaust survivor Hardy died last summer, age 93.

The 12 portraits in the exhibition were created in a collaboration between the Gamaraal Foundation, which has been working on Holocaust remembrance in Switzerland since 2014, and the Archive for Contemporary History. 

Bronislaw Erlich, born in Poland in 1923 is one of the oldest Holocaust survivors portrayed. He survived by pretending to be one of the millions of foreign forced labourers on a German farm. Had he been discovered, he would have been murdered for being Jewish. 

The final silencing of the Holocaust’s witnesses as they die has preoccupied history educators for several years. In the US, there are already attempts to turn Holocaust survivors into interactive holograms to keep their testimonies alive. 

All UN member states have to go through a periodic peer review of their human rights record. Keystone / Martial Trezzini

Switzerland could do more to fight against racism and racial discrimination on its territory, other countries told Bern at a UN review of the Swiss human rights record in Geneva on Friday.

State Secretary Livia Leu from the Swiss foreign ministry admitted earlier that Switzerland has room for improvement on racial discrimination, an issue on which it is regularly criticized.

She also said that like other countries it is facing a “resurgence of inequalities” since the Covid-19 pandemic. “Drastic measures” taken in the face of the coronavirus have highlighted potential threats to fundamental rights, particularly for minorities and the most vulnerable, she told other UN member countries. But she stressed that the human rights situation in Switzerland is still “relatively favourable”.

Leu was leading the government delegation at Switzerland’s Universal Periodic ReviewExternal link, a process of the UN Human Rights Council whereby all UN member states are subject to scrutiny by other countries on their human rights record and given recommendations on how to improve. This is Switzerland’s fourth such review.

The government has to report to the UN on what it has done to implement previous recommendations. It also receives input from independent human rights experts and groups, and from civil society. The UN is expected to issue new recommendations to Switzerland on February 1.