Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

UN sees need for improvement in Swiss asylum centres

Swiss asylum centre
Accommodation for asylum-seekers in Fribourg © Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has noted improvements in the accommodation of asylum-seekers in Switzerland. However, significant gaps in the federal asylum centres remain, including in the care of people with special needs and in the prevention of violence, the UNHCR announced on Monday.

After visiting 12 federal asylum centres in 2021 and 2022 in all asylum regions of Switzerland and talking to 269 asylum-seekers and 218 people working in the federal asylum centres, the UNHCR made several recommendations. The UN organisation also aimed to evaluate the new asylum system that was introduced in 2019.

Even though the number of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum has increased, the UNHCR called for the quality of care and continuation of school attendance to be ensured. There was also a lack of a mechanism to systematically identify special needs; staff in the federal asylum centres should be made more aware of this.

+ Swiss asylum centres recorded some 2,000 violent incidents in 2022

According to the UNHCR, there is also a lack of information for asylum-seekers, anonymous complaints mechanisms, low-threshold psychological and psychosocial support services, addiction prevention programmes and programmes for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.

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. You can find them here

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
Daily news

Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox.

Daily

The SBC Privacy Policy provides additional information on how your data is processed.

Most Read
Swiss Abroad

Most Discussed

News

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR