Swiss reject expulsion of foreigners in vote: Projections
People in Switzerland have rejected in a referendum a proposed bill aimed at toughening laws against foreigners found guilty of low-level offenses, vote projections indicate.
Public broadcaster SRF said that vote projections showed that the majority of the population said ‘no’ to the proposed bill in the Sunday vote, which would allow the automatic expulsion of foreigners convicted of misdemeanors.
The Gfs.bern polling institute said earlier in the day that 59 percent of the voters had voted against the proposal.
Six years ago, more than half of Swiss voters had voted for foreigners to be automatically expelled from the country if they committed high-level violent or sexual crimes such as murder or rape. The 2010 referendum saw 52.9 percent of those voting saying yes to such expulsions.
In 2012, however, the right-wing People’s Party launched a new initiative named “the implementation of the expulsion of criminal foreigners (the enforcement initiative).”
The new initiative had proposed to dramatically increase the number of offenses that could get foreign nationals automatically kicked out of Switzerland to include misdemeanors usually punishable with short prison sentences or fines.
Later, however, as Europe became tangled in the current refugee crisis and leaders and people across the continent called for more compassion towards foreigners, the initiative lost its steam.
Recently, more than 50,000 Swiss people, including hundreds of celebrities, signed a petition against the proposal, which was said to be contrary to the basic tenets of democracy.
A broad coalition of political parties and legal experts came out against the plan in recent months, arguing that it was “inhuman” and would effectively create a two-tier justice system that treats Switzerland’s two million or so foreigners, about a quarter of the population, more harshly.
The opponents of the bill had also warned that the bill, if approved, would put people born to foreign parents in Switzerland at risk of being deported to countries they have never lived in, over petty offenses.
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