Finally criminalizing torture in Switzerland to protect us all
OPINION. Although Switzerland helped give birth to several international conventions combating torture, Swiss national legislation does not contain the offence of torture. Attorney Alain Werner calls on the Legal Affairs Committee to remedy this anomaly.
As hard as it may be to believe, our criminal law still contains no specific offense punishing the crime of torture. Yet in 1984 our country was among the first to sign the United Nations Convention against Torture. Genevan Jean-Jacques Gautier, founder of the Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT), after publishing his powerful plea “A new weapon against torture” in La Vie protestante in 1976, was behind the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and the Committee that oversees its implementation. Switzerland played a decisive role in its adoption. The gap in our legislation is therefore a paradox that is hard to justify: the “new weapon” Gautier called for still does not appear in our own arsenal, even though at least 108 states, including 36 of the 46 members of the Council of Europe, have already equipped themselves with it.
This gap, denounced repeatedly by the United Nations and many other actors, also constitutes a threat to the safety of our citizens: we lack a necessary tool to prosecute all torturers, whether they act here or abroad, whether they are state agents or private criminals who wield power to inflict severe abuse on their victims. A decision taken last week by the Legal Affairs Committee of the National Council opens the way to changing this reality and should (finally!) give Parliament the necessary impetus to fill an unjustifiable gap.
For decades, a large majority of states have agreed to treat the gravest crimes—genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture—as international crimes that differ from ordinary offenses under each country’s law. They did so because they considered that the particular gravity of these crimes concerns all humanity, which must unite to pursue their perpetrators wherever they are in the world.
Thus, a killing committed by a soldier against a civilian in wartime is not a simple homicide but a war crime, and must be prosecuted as such, as Switzerland does and as the Geneva Conventions require. Similarly, severe abuse inflicted in a context of domination or abuse of power, whether committed in a police station or a prison or, at the other end of the spectrum, at the hands of organized crime, is not mere grievous bodily harm but acts of torture, and must be prosecuted as such. Yet that is still not possible here.
It is precisely by prosecuting these crimes for what they are that we fully join the community of nations in repressing them, contribute to the development of jurisprudence, and thus effectively combat their impunity.
Moreover, the issue does not only concern the prosecution of acts of torture committed by foreigners arrested and tried in our country.If an international crime were to be committed here by a Swiss citizen, it is highly likely that it would be neither a war crime nor a crime against humanity. Fortunately, our country faces neither armed conflict nor a widespread or systematic attack against the civilian population—preconditions required for those offenses.
By contrast, it is much harder to exclude the possibility that, somewhere in our country, atrocious acts might be committed that could constitute acts of torture. One can think both of particularly serious overreach by authorities and of violence as a structural component of organized crime. Torture can also be committed by private individuals; indeed, one of the versions of the text submitted this week to the Legal Affairs Committee of the National Council (the one that deserves to be adopted), would also punish as acts of torture situations of extreme coercion committed by private actors, notably in the context of violent kidnappings.
If I myself were to be a victim in my own country of an act of torture and, for one reason or another, the Swiss justice system refused to investigate these crimes, I would do everything possible to prosecute those responsible, whether they were Swiss, foreign, or dual nationals. It would be the height of absurdity for Switzerland if justice then had to be sought abroad, as Chilean victims of Pinochet did in Spain. Only by guaranteeing the full repression of torture under Swiss law can we ensure our own ability to protect victims; and only by giving this inhumane act its true name can we fully apprehend its atrocity, an indispensable facet of justice. That would be possible only if these crimes can be characterized under Swiss law for what they are: acts of torture. Unfortunately, those who wrongly see this as merely a symbolic measure, ignore that point. Studies show that adopting such specific norms has a real and statistically significant impact on the frequency of abuse committed in an official context.
Adopting such a measure would not lead to proceedings that cost Swiss taxpayers more; the Federal Criminal Court itself has emphasized the benefits, in terms of procedural economy, of a specific offense of torture.
There is thus no serious argument that would justify our legislators failing to adopt a measure that would finally bring us into compliance with the international obligations our country has sovereignly undertaken. Even Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy, despite its initially signaled intentions and the demands of the Italian far right, ultimately renounced repealing torture as a standalone crime in its Criminal Code, given the unpopularity of such a move among the Italian public and the proud opposition of Italian civil society and jurists.
It is high time, then, to equip ourselves with a weapon that is no longer so new, and our legislators must act and criminalize the crime of torture under Swiss law, to better protect us and future generations.
The article first appeared in French on Le Temps on the 28th of October 2025
Image: Golden Lady Justice, Bruges, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons.
