Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern!

From Ukraine to Afghanistan to Kosovo – Swiss diplomats and peacekeepers have their hands full. Here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Tuesday.

This content was published on October 25, 2022 - 18:00

2 minutes

Born in London, Thomas was a journalist at The Independent before moving to Bern in 2005. He speaks all three official Swiss languages and enjoys travelling the country and practising them, above all in pubs, restaurants and gelaterias.

In the news: The global community should formulate concrete steps to help Ukraine recover from its invasion by Russia, says Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis.

Cassis (pictured centre) advocates action similar to the US Marshall Plan that was set up to rebuild Europe following the Second World War. Cassis was speaking in Berlin at an international conference on Ukraine set up by the European Union and Germany’s presidency of the G7 nations.
Switzerland will begin its two-year term at the United Nations Security Council table on January 1 sitting between Russia and the United Arab Emirates. Switzerland will reportedly be five seats to the left of the Japanese presidency. Switzerland will itself steer the work of the 15-nation UN executive body in May for a month.
Online speech and face recognition systems should be better regulated to protect consumers, according to a Swiss technology thinktank. The study recommends that consumers be given the legal right to choose whether their biometric data can be used, citing considerable knowledge gaps on this topic among the public.

How did $3.5 billion belonging to the Afghan people dodge lawsuits and the Taliban to land in a trust fund in Switzerland? And what happens to the money now?

When a regime goes rogue, the international community can respond with any number of economic sanctions. Freezing foreign reserves is one of them. Afghanistan suffered this very fate soon after the Taliban seized power in August 2021: its roughly $9 billion (CHF9 billion) in foreign assets were frozen in the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates.

However, the US faced a complex foreign policy conundrum: how to help the Afghan people by giving them access to these funds, without a single dollar landing in the hands of the Taliban. So the US turned to an independent third party – Switzerland – to strike a unique arrangement. SWI swissinfo.ch journalist Geraldine Wong Sak Hoi looks into what happened next.

Things are tense in northern Kosovo as a deadline approaches for Serbs to swap their Belgrade-issued number plates for local ones. A seemingly trivial request from Kosovo’s government has stoked discontent among ethnic Serbs.

Swiss military personnel are among 3,600 NATO peacekeepers in the country, keeping watch. SWI swissinfo.ch video journalist Julie Hunt explains the latest developments and challenges.