More than 70,000 Ukrainian refugees flee to Switzerland

The Swiss government developed S protection status to enable the rapid admission of a group of refugees, who are thus freed from long asylum procedures. © Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

More than 70,000 people have fled to Switzerland from Ukraine and applied for refugee status, say the Swiss authorities.

As of Monday 67,621 people had been granted special “S protection” status, the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) said. This is an increase of 458 applications compared with the previous week.

The government developed S protection status in the mid-1990s in response to the Balkan wars. The mechanism is intended to enable the rapid admission of a group of refugees, who are thus freed from long asylum procedures, including individual examinations of why they fled their country. 

So far, the S status has been terminated for 5,344 people, the SEM said. The cases of 1,704 people from Ukraine are also being examined to determine whether to terminate their S refugee status.

Switzerland is expecting nearly 50% more asylum applications this year compared with 2021, prompting the construction of new accommodation centres and the support of the army.

Refugee crisis

The estimate of refugee numbers for 2022 has increased significantly since a forecast in October of 19,000 asylum applications and 85,000 Ukrainians on S permits. The SEM said on October 20 that it expected to receive 22,000 refugees by the end of the year, 7,000 more than 2021.

Since February 24, more than 7.7 millionExternal link Ukrainians have fled their country for safety across Europe. This represents the largest European refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War.

In Europe, 4.5 million people from Ukraine have applied for official refugee protection status, the SEM wrote, based on data from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the EU statistics agency Eurostat.