Swiss Nationwide Initiative, Draft
Thursday, June 5th, 2008ATTENTION SWISS CITIZENS - WE NEED YOU!
SUBJECT: How to proceed in order to launch a Swiss nationwide initiative:
DRAFT VERSION. MAY CONTAIN ERRORS.WILL BE UPDATED REGULARLY.
Requirements:
3 Swiss citizens over 20 years old
1. Create initiative committee. Write initiative paper (proposed change of Law, usually in Swiss constitution) 3 Swiss citizens need to form this committee and sign the initiative.
2. The signed initiative paper needs to be sent to the Bundeskanzlei in Berne, Switzerland
3. The Bundeskanzlei will verify the validity of the initiative. Usually no problem. (Example: initiative to remove military was valid)
4. The Bundeskanzlei will then send back to authorisation to start getting signatures. 100,000 valid signatures of Swiss citizens are required and 2 years time is allowed to get these signatures. In order to get 100,000 valid signatures, about 115,000 signatures are required, as usually 10-15 % are not valid. All signatures have to be gathered by community (Example Bern is a community, but the little Ostermundigen next to Berne is also a community). Then the signatures for each community need to be sent back to the community for official validation. The community then sends back the validated signatures to the initiative committee.
5. As soon as the 100,000 signatures are gathered, the are sent back to the Bundeskanzlei in Berne.
6. A second validation of the initiative is made by the parliament in Berne
7. If all is OK, the whole Swiss population is then asked to vote on the initiative
Notes:
It is possible to get the 100,000 signatures. With some effort. Swiss are usually very open to sign any kind of initiative that sounds remotely interesting.It is difficult to pass the popular vote. Most initiatives (about 95%) get rejected by the population [edit: even if this effort fails the consolation is that...] popular initiative is a GREAT way to raise this awareness.
Getting popular people to support an initiative can help a lot. Dr. Roessler would be an ideal candidate Getting the signatures requires people. As far as I know, the government has to allow public space (on high frequency places) to build stands, to display information material etc.