Refugee Council head criticises ‘hasty’ Swiss asylum procedures

Miriam Behrens, pictured in 2015. Keystone / Walter Bieri

The new system of accelerated asylum processing is leading to a focus on speed above all else, and with that, a decline in the quality of decisions, a refugee rights group has warned.

Miriam Behrens, the director of the non-governmental Swiss Refugee CouncilExternal link, said on Tuesday her organisation had seen a big jump in the amount of successful appeals by asylum seekers since the nationwide system was introduced in March 2019.

The fact that so many complaints raised by asylum seekers – against decisions made by the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) – are being upheld by courts shows that there is an issue, she said in interviews with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) and Le Temps newspapers.

Before the reform was introduced, just 4.8% of appeals had been sent by the court back for further review, while in the first six months of the new system, the figure rose to 16.8%.

“Authorities are putting the focus on speeding up the process, to the detriment of quality and fairness,” Behrens said. And with more cases now being sent back to the SEM for further review, the effect is in fact counter-productive, she added.

Fairer, faster

The accelerated procedures, approved by voters in 2016, were introduced last year with the goal of shortening the time it takes to finish proceedings from an average of 280 days (in 2015) to 140 days. People who filed asylum requests were allocated to one of six national centres across the country, rather than being processed by cantonal authorities.

The idea is to avoid drawn-out procedures which keep asylum-seekers waiting for a decision for several years, without the possibility to work or integrate into society. 

Authorities said that the new system would be fairer for everyone; the Swiss Refugee Council also supported the reform.

SEM director Mario Gattiker told the NZZ in a December interviewExternal link that the new rules were working well, and that many more asylum seekers were returning home voluntarily than before.

Behrens, however, says that the “over-ambitious” time goals of the SEM are leading to cases not being thoroughly enough analysed – especially complex cases, such as asylum seekers having fled torture or who are physically or mentally unwell.

These people do not reveal everything about themselves over the course of the first meeting, she said. “You need to gain their trust, which is not possible under the current tempo.”

The number of people seeking asylum in Switzerland fell to a 12-year low of 14,269 in 2019. Most asylum seekers (2,899) came from Eritrea, with Afghanistan (1,397), Turkey (1,287) and Syria (1,100) also featuring prominently among applicants.