Swissinfo on 23rd October reported that Swiss federal authorities fail to correctly monitor the application of economic sanctions, an influential Senate committee has warned. An evaluation found that the Federal Council had a clear policy regarding economic sanctions coupled with appropriate legislation, but the implementation of sanctions was “deficient”. UN sanctions apply in Switzerland, but EU sanctions are applied by the Swiss government on a case-by-case basis, while weighing up national interests. T committee calls for better supervision of sanctions by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), and it claims SECO only monitors their implementation on an ad-hoc basis and does not make full use of the instruments at its disposal. It said that applying financial sanctions was problematic owing to their complexity, and controls were almost non-existent in this area, as for luxury products; and while trade sanctions are widely respected by businesses, imports and exports of sanctioned goods continue.
