A Swiss citizen is stranded in Belgium. His bank accounts are frozen. His friends are legally barred from helping him. No charges have been filed. No court has ruled. Yet the sanctions stand.
This is the reality facing Jacques Baud—and it has now drawn scrutiny from Switzerland’s oldest German-language daily, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
In a three-part series (1, 2, 3 published just before Christmas, the NZZ dismantles the EU’s sanctions against the former intelligence officer as politically motivated, legally dubious, and yet quietly accepted by Switzerland. When Baud warned the Swiss mission to the EU that sanctions were imminent, it took ten days to receive a response. Switzerland was never consulted before the decision was taken.
The paper asks: how far is Switzerland willing to abandon rule-of-law protections for its own citizens?
