BERN. Justice Minister Beat Jans has ordered an internal inquiry into the Lex On, the loosening of Switzerland’s Swissness rules that let the Zurich running-shoe brand On keep a Swiss cross on shoes made in Asia. The NZZ am Sonntag reported on Sunday that the justice department will examine how the change was handled and how it was explained. The report is expected in the first quarter of 2027.
The inquiry follows contradictory accounts given to the National Council’s control committee. Jans told the committee he had not been informed about the dispute over the cross on On’s Asian production. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property said it had briefed his general secretariat more than once. Those two versions cannot both be the whole story, and the review is the department’s attempt to say which one is.
What the Lex On actually changed
Swissness is the set of rules that decides when a product may carry the Swiss cross or call itself Swiss. For a consumer brand, that mark is not decoration. It is the reason a pair of shoes can be priced like a Swiss export when the factory is somewhere else. The practice change, which took effect in March 2026 after pressure from On, loosened the line. The Sunday papers describe a change that was pushed through, not a change that the administration agreed on.
Inside the federal government the split is still open. The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs defends the loosening. The defence department and the Federal Office for Agriculture oppose it. That is an unusual coalition against a shoe company, and it tells you the argument is not really about trainers. Agriculture lives by the same cross. So does a weapons export licence, a cheese label and a watch case. If the mark can be stretched for one firm, every other firm will ask why not.
Why the committee hearing matters more than the shoes
The control committee does not design trademarks. It asks whether ministers were told the truth in time to be responsible for it. Jans’s line is that he was not told. The institute’s line is that his office was told repeatedly. An internal review run by his own department will not settle that for the committee. It can, if it is written plainly, show the emails, the dates and the moment the practice changed. The first quarter of 2027 is a long wait for a file that is already in the building.
On has not been accused, in the Sunday reporting, of breaking a criminal law. The political charge is that a private firm obtained a reading of the rules that other parts of the administration still reject. Buyers who paid for a Swiss cross on the box are entitled to know what that cross still means. So are the farmers and manufacturers who have spent years meeting a stricter test. A separate court case this autumn refused Levi’s pocket stitching a Swiss trademark, and sent the question of acquired distinctiveness back to the same institute. The institute is now at the centre of two arguments about what a mark is worth. Only one of them has a minister attached.
What to watch for in the report
Three questions will show whether the review is a filing exercise or a finding. Who in the general secretariat received the institute’s warnings, and when. Whether the March practice note was cleared above the level of a technical office. And whether SECO, the defence department and the agriculture office were asked to agree, or merely informed after the fact. If the report answers those three, the committee can decide whether the minister was kept out or kept himself out. If it answers with process language and no dates, the Lex On will still be a nickname for a rule that moved faster than the people elected to own it.