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The Order on promoting the cinema (OECin) enacted by the Département Fédéral de l’Intérieur (Swiss Ministry of the Interior - DFI) has been revised as of 1 July 2006. The changes made to the Order reflect the increased importance the Office Fédéral de la Culture (Swiss Ministry for Culture - OFC) wishes to give to policy on the cinema in Switzerland. The OFC intends to increase its support for the promotion and distribution of films with a view to increasing their presence both in Switzerland and on the international market. The structures for selective encouragement have been reorganised with...

In a judgment of 25 April 2006, the Court unanimously held that the Swiss authorities violated Article 10 of the Convention by convicting a journalist, Viktor Dammann, for inciting an administrative assistant of the public prosecutor’s office to disclose confidential data. The assistant had forwarded data relating to criminal records of suspects in a spectacular robbery. By punishing the journalist in this case, a step had been taken prior to publication and such a sentence would be likely to deter journalists from contributing to public discussion of issues affecting the life of the community....

In December 1996, the Swiss ambassador to the United States drew up a “strategic document”, classified as “confidential”, concerning the possible strategies regarding the compensation due to Holocaust victims for unclaimed assets deposited in Swiss banks. The document was sent to the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in Berne and to a limited list of other persons. Martin Stoll, a journalist working for Sonntags-Zeitung , also obtained a copy of this document, probably as a result of a breach of professional confidence by one of the initial recipients of such a copy. Soon afterwards, the Sonntags-Zeitung...

The agreement between Switzerland and the European Union on Switzerland’s participation in the MEDIA Plus and MEDIA Formation programmes came into force on 1 April 2006. The agreement was concluded on 26 October 2004 during the second round of bilateral negotiations on a number of issues, including - in addition to the MEDIA programme - extension of the agreement on the free movement of persons to the European Union’s new Member States, taxation on savings, and combating fraud in indirect taxation (see IRIS 2004-7:6). Switzerland will contribute 7.9 million Swiss francs per year to the cost of...

The Swiss Federal Council has published the Bill that will revise part of Swiss national legislation on copyright and related rights. The purpose of the Bill is to enable Switzerland to ratify the “Internet treaties” of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) - the copyright treaty (WCT) and the performances and phonograms treaty (WPPT). This means that the new provisions will transpose into Swiss national law the standards of protection required by these treaties (see IRIS 2005-8: 11). The Bill provides for prohibiting the circumvention of technical means of protection such as electronic...