Switzerland is routinely ranked among the world’s most successful democracies: prosperous, stable, and institutionally mature. This study asks whether that reputation survives scrutiny of one freedom in particular — the right to protest — when it is examined not through the familiar language of civil liberties but through the Right to Development (RtD), affirmed in the 1986 UN Declaration and more often turned outward, toward the Global South, than onto a wealthy democracy’s own population. Turning the lens inward, this study argues that Switzerland fulfils the material dimension of development while accumulating substantial and widening deficits in its participatory dimension — the element the Declaration treats as constitutive, not ornamental.
The argument proceeds through normative analysis of the relevant instruments, an empirical survey of protest governance drawn from more than 130 primary and secondary sources across several cantons, and a comparative European assessment. Six areas of tension are examined: the transfer of policing costs onto demonstrators, structurally unpunished police violence, the permit requirement, the Störer or ‘disturber’ doctrine and the political responses it has provoked, the exclusion of the roughly one quarter of residents who hold no Swiss citizenship, and the rise of crowdsourced facial recognition deployed by far-right networks.
Two findings give the study its edge. First, the demonstrations of 2021 are read as a ‘laboratory of repression’: a toolkit of crowd control — rubber buckshot, kettling, cost transfer, and the summary dissolution of unauthorised gatherings — was first systematised there and then transferred intact into the ordinary policing of unauthorised demonstrations, showing the shrinking of civic space to be systematic rather than incidental. Second, the restrictions operate as structural violence in Galtung’s sense — permits, cost orders and criminal provisions, each individually lawful, combining to price and frighten dissent out of public space — and the tendency driving them works not against democratic forms but through them.
The study concludes that Switzerland does not meet its obligations under the Right to Development, and that the deficit falls hardest on those for whom assembly is not a supplement to political participation but its principal avenue. Conceptually, it reframes protest as a constitutive element of development within a Global North democracy; empirically, it documents a repressive genealogy through mid-2026. The right to protest, this study suggests, is not a luxury a developed society can afford to restrict; it is a measure of whether that society is developing at all.
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Mariana Erzinger – born in Argentina and a Swiss citizen, lives and works in Basel. She completed a Master of Arts in Sustainable Peace in the Contemporary World at the University for Peace (UPEACE), the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica; this study was produced there as her Independent Research Project. She is active in the Basel Right to Protest network.