The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Geneva

Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected an anti-immigrant initiative that would have made it harder for foreigners to gain citizenship, according to referendum results released Sunday.

All but one of 26 Swiss cantons (states) rejected the initiative by the nationalistic Swiss People's Party, while in the overall population 63.8 percent voted against it, according to official results.

The initiative was aimed at overturning a Supreme Court ruling that barred the widely denounced practice in some Swiss communities of subjecting citizenship applications to a popular vote.

"The people clearly said: 'We don't want xenophobia and we want direct democracy to respect basic rights,'" Swiss President Pascal Couchepin said on Swiss television SF.

People's Party lawmaker Hans Fehr said he still believed the requirements for Swiss citizenship should be more stringent. The party's campaign poster publicizing the initiative revived the imagery of brown hands clutching passports that in 2004 helped the party succeed in a similar campaign to curb naturalizations.

For the initiative to have passed, a majority of cantons would have had to support it, as well as an overall majority of voters. Turnout for the referendum was 44.1 percent. In some cantons, up to 82 percent of voters rejected the initiative. Only Schwyz canton, in the country's conservative central heartland, voted in favor.

More than 20 percent of the 7.5 million population in Switzerland are foreigners - one of the highest percentages in Europe. Children born in Switzerland to foreign parents have no automatic right to Swiss citizenship and must go through a naturalization process.

Each Swiss canton decides the process by which foreigners can become citizens, but applicants must have lived in the country for 12 years. Rejected applicants can appeal to the Supreme Court if they claim discrimination or violation of other basic rights. If Swiss voters had adopted the right-wing initiative, local communities again could have subjected naturalization candidates to a popular vote, this time without possibility of appeal.

The Federal Tribunal abolished community votes on immigrants five years ago after a referendum in the central Swiss town of Emmen rejected all 48 Eastern European and Turkish candidates for citizenship even though they had been thoroughly reviewed and approved as good inhabitants by local authorities. Eight Italians were approved.

Five former Yugoslavs among those rejected appealed to the Supreme Court, which held that they had been discriminated against because of their ethnic and religious origin. It said in a separate ruling that applicants had a right to know the reason for their rejection, which a public vote makes impossible.