Black Sheep Posters Return Before Deportation Vote (Switzerland)

Source: NPR

Posters at Zurich, Switzerland, train station show a black sheep being kicked off the Swiss flag by a white sheep. They are part of a campaign in favor of deporting criminal foreigners from Switzerland. They were widely condemned as racist when the Swiss People's Party launched them three years ago. Now, as the nationalist party's demand to automatically deport foreigners convicted of serious crimes goes before a Sunday referendum, the posters have been cropping up again in stations and squares.

Polls show the message is getting through. A survey published last week by polling group gfs.bern showed 54 percent of voters approved the measure, which also proposes to kick out foreigners found guilty of benefit fraud. In the poll of 771 voters conducted Nov. 8-13, 43 percent opposed the plan and 3 percent were undecided.

Critics of the deportation proposal include legal experts, who say the law could clash with international treaties that Switzerland has signed up to. "For the same crime some people will suffer one punishment, other people suffer two punishments," said Marcelo Kohen, a professor of international law at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.

Kohen said foreigners who have lived all their life in Switzerland, married Swiss citizens and had children, would be unusually hard hit by expulsion. Likewise, under international law refugees cannot be sent back to their country of origin if they face persecution there.

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