Swiss-EU treaties: signatures handed in for Kompass initiative

Handing in signatures to the Federal Chancellery. Keystone-SDA

The committee behind the Compass Initiative submitted the signatures it had collected to the Federal Chancellery on Friday.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The petition for a referendum wants to make the new treaties with the EU subject to a majority of the cantons. The exact date of the vote is likely to be a topic of discussion.

The initiators announced that more than 115,000 of the 140,000 signatures submitted had been authenticated. They reiterated their demand that the petition for a referendum should be put to the vote before a decision is made on the treaties with Brussels.

The government is proposing that the treaty package should only be subject to an optional referendum. This would mean that a majority of the people would be required for ratification, but not a majority of the cantons. The Federal Constitution does not provide for a mandatory referendum in such cases, it argues.

+ The Swiss-EU bilateral treaty updates, explained

The authors of the Compass Initiative, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the new treaties would make deep cuts to direct democracy and Switzerland’s sovereignty. The dynamic adoption of EU law would be tantamount to “passive EU membership”, they say.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]