When asylum cases age into middle age

Four years for a ruling is not exactly the sort of administrative briskness one associates with a well-run state. Yet that is what some asylum appellants have faced at Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court, where cases can linger for more than four years. One affected person even resorted to a hunger strike last July, a rather grim way of pointing out that patience is not infinite.

The criticism did not come out of nowhere. The Federal Supreme Court had already reprimanded the backlog and asked the Federal Administrative Court to explain how it intended to clear the old cases. The court has now done so in a letter dated 27 August 2026, which SRF has seen. Its message is plain enough: the pile-up is the result of a steep rise in appeals, especially in asylum matters, and the court says it was not sitting on its hands.

According to the court, the main trigger was the State Secretariat for Migration’s expansion of its own decision-making capacity. SEM added 200 full-time positions and began processing asylum applications more quickly, which naturally produced more appeals. In other words, one part of the state accelerated, and another part was left to absorb the shock. A modern public sector, apparently, still struggles with the concept of coordination.

The court says it reacted already at the beginning of 2023 by requesting additional staff. But almost two years passed between the request and any effective reinforcement. Parliament did increase the number of judges, yet the positions first had to be approved, advertised and filled. Then came the familiar bureaucratic afterlife: training. Many of the newly appointed judges had no experience in asylum law, and the same was true for some of the court clerks, so the learning curve was not short.

There is also a structural constraint that cannot be wished away. Judges are independent, which means the court’s leadership has no authority to order them to work faster. The administration commission and the division presidents cannot simply issue instructions and expect the backlog to evaporate. The court points out that its work cannot be run like a standard office, and that is true enough. Independence has a price, and in this case it is measured in years.

Barbara von Rütte, assistant professor at the University of Bern’s Centre for Migration Law, notes that judges are elected by the Federal Assembly for six-year terms and cannot simply be dismissed when the flow of cases drops again. That makes the Federal Administrative Court far less flexible than SEM, which can add or cut temporary posts depending on asylum numbers. Since asylum applications have been declining for two years, SEM is already scaling back some temporary positions.

The problem is that asylum figures are famously volatile. Wars push them up; calmer periods pull them down. Von Rütte points to Syria as an example: for ten years many refugees came from there, but since the fall of the Assad regime, applications from Syrians have fallen. For now, that suggests some relief. But the court itself warns that a new wave of appeals could quickly create another jam.

The court says any real flexibility would require a change in the law. One idea under consideration is a pool of extraordinary judges, elected by the competent bodies and deployed full-time only when demand spikes. Once the exceptional burden ends, so would their assignment. It is a sensible thought, which in the Swiss system usually means it will first have to survive a legislative pilgrimage. The broader lesson is hardly glamorous: if the state builds rigid structures for a volatile field, the backlog is not an accident. It is a design feature.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com