Today, 19 civil society organisations, including EDRi, are urging the Swiss Federal Councilor to make changes to the proposed Ordinance. The current proposal:

• Violates people’s fundamental rights to privacy and data protection
• Has a chilling effect on people exercising other rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of assembly and association
• Is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
• Poses a risk to Switzerland’s adequacy status with the EU
• Creates huge cybersecurity risks for users, endangering their sensitive data
• Doesn’t compare to other less intrusive alternative measures that wouldn’t subject the entire population to mass surveillance

Civil society calls on the Federal Councilor to abandon any proposals for wide-ranging, blanket data retention obligations, privacy-effacing identification obligations, weakening of crucial legal safeguards and automatic data disclosures in the revision of the VÜPF Ordinance. They recommend instead to align the Swiss legislation with the highest standards of protection set by both the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.