61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

students, as well as a high-school camp for Italian teenagers. 153 These changes
can be largely explained by the progress of the war: thanks to the Allied
victories, the end of the refugees’ stay in Switzerland could be foreseen. They
began to appear more confident and demanded the right to have a say in their
own future. As Switzerland’s situation changed with regard to the international
state of affairs, the authorities on their part seemed to increasingly perceive the
refugees as those who would shape the future of Europe, and therefore set new
priorities in asylum policy. It was against this background that a Joint
Commission (Commission mixte) was set up in June 1945 which dealt with the
many problems that arose in the post-war period, such as the issue of stateless
persons. Unlike the Federal Commission of Experts for Refugee Matters
(Eidgenössische Sachverständigenkommission für Flüchtlingsfragen) that was set up in
February 1944 and which included representatives of the relief organisations
but none from among the refugees themselves, the refugees were now allowed
to appoint their own delegates to the Joint Committee.
Towards the end of the war, the question of the refugees’ future took on an everincreasing
importance. In order to get an idea of the refugees’ own thoughts,
the Central Office for Refugee Relief and the Swiss section of the International
Migration Service organised a survey among them to obtain information about
their plans for the future. The results of this survey, which was carried out for
the first time in 1944, revealed that only a minority of 25% of the 5,000 or so
refugees questioned wished to return to their own country. Refugees from
Poland and Germany in particular categorically refused to be repatriated. The
reasons were plain: 80% of those questioned were Jewish and did not wish to
return to the country where they had been persecuted. Germans, Austrians and
Poles feared a revival of anti-Semitism in their home countries; in addition
many eastern European Jews had emigrated to the West long before the war and
had been driven out of the country where they were staying only when it had
been occupied by the Germans. The majority of the refugees preferred to
migrate to a European country, while Palestine, where the political situation
was still unclear at the time of the survey, was given as a desired destination by
only 9% of the refugees. 154
Many people, however, simply did not have the strength to start a new life for
the third, fourth or fifth time. For some time, the relief organisations had been
demanding that they be given permanent residence in Switzerland. After the
Federal Council’s initial push for a quick departure of the refugees, it agreed in
1947 to issue permanent residence permits: with certain restrictions, the
Federal Council Decree of 7 March 1947 provided permanent asylum for
refugees who could not be expected to migrate to another country yet again. 155
In 1951, the obligation to leave Switzerland, to which those refugees still in the
157