Cassis cancels visit to Swiss university for security reasons

Ignazio Cassis (right) with his Slovakian counterpart Juraj Blanár. Keystone-SDA

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis cancelled his planned visit to the University of Fribourg on Tuesday for a panel discussion with his Slovakian counterpart Juraj Blanár. The reason was a call for a demonstration by several collectives for Palestine.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

In order to ensure the safety of the participants, the foreign ministry was forced to cancel the entire event planned for Tuesday at 3pm.

+ Explainer: Switzerland and the recognition of Palestine

According to the foreign ministry, the conditions for the smooth running of the event, which was to be held under the motto “A polarised world: challenges and opportunities for the rule of law and democracy”, were not met.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].