BERN. Murder is about to join the shortest list in Swiss criminal law: the offences that never expire. The Council of States closed the last remaining difference with the National Council on Wednesday morning, deciding to stand by the earlier decisions of both chambers and abolish the 30 year limitation period for murder. After years of procedural back and forth, the two chambers are aligned. A formal final vote of the Federal Assembly, expected this session, is all that remains before the change becomes law.
Under the law as it stands, a murder that goes unsolved for three decades can no longer be prosecuted, however strong the evidence that later surfaces. The amendment to the Criminal Code and the Military Criminal Code removes that horizon. Once in force, prosecutors will be able to pursue a murder case for as long as the accused is alive, and the passage of time will protect no one.
Murder will join company that is revealing about what Switzerland considers beyond forgiveness: crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes and certain sexual offences against children are already imprescriptible. The argument that carried the day in both chambers is that the gravest crime against an individual belongs in that company, not in the same category as offences the state agrees to let rest.
The reform began in St. Gallen. The canton’s initiative demanded the abolition of the limitation period for all offences punishable by life imprisonment, arguing that modern DNA analysis gives investigators the means to prove cases decades after the act. The Senate’s legal affairs committee narrowed the demand to murder alone, and drafted the bill that has now survived every attempt to stop it.
The path was not straight. The Council of States first said yes in March 2025, by 34 votes to 5. The National Council followed in March this year, but only at the request of a minority: the People’s Party prevailed with the support of the Radical Liberals and the Centre, against the majority of its own legal affairs committee, which had asked for the limitation period to be preserved. Because the House also adjusted limitation periods for other offences, raising intentional killing and further crimes from 15 to 30 years, the bill went back to the Senate.
Over the summer, both legal committees attempted to pull the reform back. The House committee voted 13 to 10 in August to reconsider, with the majority of the Senate committee arguing that victims’ interests could be served well enough by the longer 30 year periods. On Wednesday it was the minority of that Senate committee that won the floor, and with it the argument that the chambers had already decided, twice, what they meant.
The opposition case is not frivolous, and it was heard at length. The consultation round on the proposal returned a majority against it, and the Federal Council itself expressed reservations. Critics warn that a fair trial becomes harder for everyone as decades pass: memories decay, witnesses die, and the accused has the same right to a reliable process as the prosecution. That, they argue, is why the law invented limitation periods in the first place.
The counterargument has the simpler shape. Relatives of murder victims do not experience a 30 year line as closure, and cold cases are no longer a literary genre: investigators across Europe now clear decades old murders with evidence that could not have been read when the crime was committed. A limitation written for the forensic age of the last century, supporters say, should not survive this one.
What changes in practice is deliberately narrow. The final vote is a formality, entry into force will follow the usual promulgation, and prosecutors expect a small number of shelved cases to be reviewed rather than a wave of new indictments. Defence lawyers will test the first prosecutions hard, as they should. A limitation period is a promise that time will end the case. For murder, parliament has decided it should not, and on Wednesday the last chamber that could have changed its mind declined to.