The Impact of the Pan-European General Principles of Good Administration on Swiss Law

This chapter is dedicated to exploring the impact on Swiss administrative law of the pan-European general principles of good administration developed within the framework of the Council of Europe (CoE). The chapter claims that the standards stemming from the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights have been adopted in an exemplary way by Swiss authorities. The influence was especially strong in the 1980s and 1990s. The same cannot be said regarding other documents of the CoE, whose impact remains disparate because many aspects of the pan-European general principles of good administration were already part of the national written law. The chapter concludes that despite the exemplary integration of CoE instruments heated debates on the content of these instruments are not excluded from Switzerland.