LAUSANNE. The Federal Court has told the commune of Freienbach that it was wrong to refuse a German primary-school teacher a Swiss passport because of gaps in her naturalisation interview. Judgment 1D_3/2026, dated 23 September 2026, upholds a ruling of the Schwyz administrative court and orders the commune to carry on with the file. It does not hand her the citizenship. It says the refusal, as Freienbach constructed it, was an abuse of discretion.
The teacher was born in 1978. She has lived in Switzerland since 1 August 2010 and in Freienbach since 18 April 2017, where she teaches in a primary school. She and her husband, also a German national with a C permit, applied with their two children for ordinary naturalisation on 4 June 2024. At a hearing on 1 July 2025 the commune naturalised the husband and the children, and refused her. She appealed on 2 September 2025. On 20 February 2026 the cantonal administrative court, chamber III, upheld the appeal, quashed the refusal and sent the application back to be dealt with in line with its reasoning. Freienbach took that decision to Lausanne. The Federal Court, sitting as Judges Haag, Müller and Merz, dismissed the commune’s appeal.
What the interview was allowed to prove, and what it was not
The administrative court accepted that her answers showed a real gap. Familiarity with local, cantonal and Swiss conditions, and with everyday customs, is a lawful thing for a commune to test, and Freienbach was entitled to find the test imperfectly passed. She had, on the lower court’s reading, answered about two thirds of the questions and follow-ups correctly. Her lawyer put the share of correct answers at 74 per cent, and said some of the answers marked wrong were partly right. The Federal Court did not need to pick between those figures. It accepted that the gap was not serious enough to justify a refusal on its own.
Swiss naturalisation law requires an overall assessment. Article 12 of the Citizenship Act lists integration criteria, and the list is not a set of hurdles to be failed one by one. A single shortcoming can decide a case only when it is serious enough to decide it alone, the way a significant criminal record can. A patchy interview is not that kind of fact. Strengths elsewhere in the file can outweigh it. Freienbach argued that the hearing, conducted by a commission drawn from different political and social groups, is exactly where the legislature wanted the weight to sit, and that the cantonal court had turned the commune into a body that only nods. Lausanne disagreed.
German as a mother tongue, and club work done as a mother
The commune’s sharpest argument was about effort. Because the applicant’s mother tongue is German, Freienbach said her language was a biographical accident, not an achievement of integration, and that a German applicant would show effort by learning dialect. The court’s answer is blunt. The law judges the quality of integration, not only the struggle it took to get there. Factors may not be ignored merely because they were easy to satisfy. Speaking good German is still speaking good German. The teacher had also learned French and Italian by her own work, which the administrative court counted and which the commune had set aside.
The second argument failed more loudly. Freienbach said her work with her children’s football club, figure-skating club, shooting club, ski team, music school and parish did not count for her, because she did it as a mother. The Federal Court called that view close to arbitrary. The Citizenship Act expressly treats support for the integration of one’s own minor children as a sign of successful integration. Driving to training, helping to run a tournament, standing in as an assistant coach and helping with family services at the Freienbach church are how a working parent meets the town. The judgment says those hours integrate her, not only the children. Her years in the primary school do the same.
What other communes should take from a file that is still open
The case was argued as a defence of communal autonomy under article 50 of the constitution. Communes do have wide discretion in ordinary naturalisation, and appeal courts may not simply substitute their taste for the commission’s. They may ask whether the discretion was used properly. Here, the Federal Court said, it was not. Freienbach had already explained, in its written submissions, why it thought the rest of the file could not repair the interview. The administrative court was entitled to review that weighting rather than send the papers back for a ritual second look.
Applicants should not read the judgment as a promise that two thirds of the questions are a pass mark. Communes should not read it as a ban on hard questions. The rule it states is narrower, and more useful. A knowledge gap that is real but not severe has to be set beside work, language, a clean record and the unglamorous labour of raising children inside local clubs. Refuse on the gap alone, and the refusal is now the thing that will not survive Lausanne. The teacher’s own passport is still a step away: Freienbach must continue the procedure, on a finding that she is, in the round, integrated. The interview that stopped her in July 2025 is no longer a lawful place to stop.