By the end of 2023, the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) had recorded the controlled departure under police escort of 1,531 people.
Keystone-SDA
Swiss courts ordered the expulsion of 2,250 foreign offenders in 2023. By mid-2024, around 73% of them had left Switzerland, either voluntarily or under police escort, the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) said on Tuesday.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
Roughly one-third of the departures during this period were voluntary, SEM said in a statement.
By the end of 2023, the secretariat had recorded the controlled departure under police escort of 1,531 people. Since such expulsions require a certain amount of preparation, court orders from the end of last year could only be executed in 2024.
Around 140 additional people ordered to be expelled in 2023 left Switzerland under police escort during the first half of 2024, taking the deportation rate for 2023 to almost 73%. As further evictions are planned, this number should rise further.
+ Deportation now a reality for foreign criminals
Around one-third of those who were expelled from Switzerland were nationals from a European Union or European Free Trade Association (EFTA) country, mainly Romania (9%), France (5%) and Italy (5%).
Third-country nationals came mostly from Albania (17%), Algeria (10%) and Morocco (4%). More than 90% of departures were men, mostly aged between 18 and 54, according to SEM statistics.
Adapted from French by DeepL/sb
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
