BERN. Eritreans living in Switzerland under temporary admission no longer have to collect papers from their country’s embassy before they can apply for an ordinary residence permit. The State Secretariat for Migration has changed the practice, the NZZ am Sonntag reported on Sunday, to comply with a Federal Supreme Court judgment from November 2025. About 2,000 people are affected.
The judgment turned on a document the embassy had been requiring: a declaration of repentance. The court found that demand legally problematic. As long as a regular B permit depended on obtaining it, the people concerned were being sent to a mission whose conditions Swiss judges were not prepared to underwrite. The secretariat’s new line removes that errand. It does not hand anyone a permit. It removes a paper that had been standing in front of the application.
What temporary admission is, and what a B permit changes
Temporary admission, the F permit, is the status Switzerland uses when a person cannot be sent home even though they have no full right to stay. It is legal, it is reviewed, and it is precarious. A B permit is an ordinary residence title. It is still conditional, and it can still be lost, but it is the document employers, landlords and cantonal offices treat as a normal life. For the 2,000 people in this group, the change is the difference between being told to fetch a letter from an embassy and being allowed to put a file on a Swiss desk.
Identity still has to be established. The Free Democrats’ objection, reported on Sunday, is precisely that a file without embassy papers is harder to pin to one person, and the party also wants removals to Eritrea to resume where the law allows. The Swiss People’s Party has criticised the change on the same ground. The Social Democrats welcomed it. Justice Minister Beat Jans, asked by the newspaper, did not pick a side in that argument. He pointed at the court. “Of course the SEM is implementing this judgment as well,” he said.
A ruling is not a new asylum policy
The judgment does not rewrite who may enter Switzerland, and it does not convert an F permit into a B permit by itself. Cantons still decide residence applications against the usual tests: identity, integration, a clean enough criminal record, and the rules that apply to the status the person already holds. What they can no longer do, if they were following the old federal practice, is refuse to open the file because the Eritrean mission has not stamped a repentance letter.
That distinction will be tested in the first refusals. If a canton turns an applicant away for lack of the old embassy paper, the judgment is not being applied. If a canton turns an applicant away because identity is genuinely not shown, the judgment has nothing to say against it. The FDP’s worry and the SP’s welcome can both be true of different files. The secretariat’s job, having lost the point in Lausanne last November, is to make sure the letter is no longer the reason.
Why it took a year to show up in the Sunday papers
Federal Court judgments bind the administration the day they are final. They do not always bind it in the leaflet on the counter. Sunday’s report is the public confirmation that the counter has caught up, a year on, for this particular group. People who were told last winter to go to the embassy should ask the cantonal migration office, not the mission, what the file now requires. The minister’s sentence is short because the legal position is short. The court has ruled. The secretariat says it is doing what the court required. The B permit, for each of the 2,000, is still a separate decision.