Statistics in Switzerland: a mixture of stupefaction and incomprehension
Rejected by the Federal Council, the parliamentary motion related to "Improving statistics on missing children" ended up. being dropped.
Switzerland currently has no official statistics on the disappearance of minors. It is therefore impossible to know how many young people disappear each year on the territory or even simply to get an idea of the extent of the phenomenon in our country.
To fill this gap, former National Councillor Géraldine Marchand-Ballet, with the support of the Sarah Oberson Foundation, tabled a parliamentary motion inSeptember 2017 to "improve the statistical reporting of missing children.
This motion had meanwhile been the subject of a negative opinion from the Federal Council, which explained in particular that it did not consider that "the production of detailed statistics really provides operational added value" and that it would "require disproportionate resources".
Today, this motion has simply been liquidated and will therefore never appear on the political agenda, "because the National Council has not completed its examination within two years".
Missing Children Switzerland would like to express its outrage at the fate of this motion. The fact that this matter has not been resolved and the arguments put forward by the Federal Council to reject it constitute a real disavowal for our cause and that of missing children.
The refusal to put on the agenda a problem as central as the impossibility of quantifying the disappearances of minors in Switzerland is absolutely incomprehensible to us and shows a real lack of political will to respond to this need, which is so central.
We are therefore waiting for a new motion to be tabled in Parliament and for Ms. Marchand-Ballet to honour her commitments by forwarding this item to another elected official now that her federal term of office has expired.
