This is not true however, as under Swiss law, Swiss authorities don't have the legal power to issue such an order. Swiss law is very clear on this point.
That's a bit previous, as my my grandmother used to say. I'd need to see a lot more context and also to see this ruling adopted in other jurisdictions before I'd expect any sort of impact on that - I don't know much about Swiss law and it's equally possible that this judgement might be overturned because the judge misunderstood how social media works, for example.
OTOH I do wish there were some sort of legal remedy against such fakery.
If this decision stands, then surely Switzerland will have to construct an entire new legal apparatus to deal with the volume of legal cases when people "like" something that is untrue?
Switzerland is a grouping of "Cantons" and each has very distinct autonomy. Some of them are far more conservative than others, and are going to have judges who are going to make decisions accordingly.
As much as we might like to believe it, law is not universally applied in a fair manner. Swiss authorities will approve requests that are total garbage requests. I happen to be on the receiving end of one of those, which was eventually, after significant time, effort and money thrown out for prejudice.
So what must the swiss government do if it wishes to comply? they control a lot of the world's financial system so they can threaten to cut off funding lines of poor polluting countries. But that would cause great unrest in those poor countries and undoubtedly would worsen the lives of many many more, in order to improve the quality of life of these 4 swiss ladies.
Can citizens from every country bring similar cases to the court? Then they will have no option but to produce hundreds of mutually-contradictory rulings. I wonder if they have set an interesting precedent for themselves
Note that the recent case involved a crime in France.
So really, it's more like 'unless you commit a crime in a country that cooperates with Switzerland and the Swiss legal system decides to hand in a request'
This decision is from 2019, so they have to deal with it since 2019. Or did I miss something about the swiss legal system?
And, if challenged, I'm pretty sure that judges might "judge" different if confronted with the current "state-of-emergency"-kind of situation.
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