by whataboutbob
Fri Sep 7th, 2007 at 08:38:56 AM EST
I guess I'm kind of beating the drum on this topic, but...what the heck, it's news! From Stormy Present in today's Salon, via The Independent: Switzerland: Europe's heart of darkness?
Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations. Proposals for draconian new laws that target the country's immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist. A poster campaign, the work of its leading political party, is decried as xenophobic. (...)
A worrying new extremism is on the rise. For the poster - which bears the slogan "For More Security" - is not the work of a fringe neo-Nazi group. It has been conceived - and plastered on to billboards, into newspapers and posted to every home in a direct mailshot - by the Swiss People's Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country's coalition government.
With a general election due next month, it has launched a twofold campaign which has caused the UN's special rapporteur on racism to ask for an official explanation from the government. The SVP party has launched a campaign to raise the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes once they have served their jail sentence.
I find myself wondering, now that the news is spreading out into Europe, just how the Swiss people will respond to this. I hope the Swiss vote decisively against the SVP and their racist campaign. Will enough people care about this to vote?
But far more dramatically, it has announced its intention to lay before parliament a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as sentence is passed.
It will be the first such law in Europe since the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft - kin liability - whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for their crimes and punished equally.
The proposal will be a test case not just for Switzerland but for the whole of Europe, where a division between liberal multiculturalism and a conservative isolationism is opening up in political discourse in many countries, the UK included.
The eyes are now on Switzerland...what will be their legacy??