Switzerland has announced it will cancel its development aid payments to Eritrea as of May.
It said on February 3 that was because the East African country headed by authoritarian President Isaias Afwerk since 1993 continued to refuse to take back asylum seekers whose claims had been denied.
“We could not make real progress on the migration agenda,” a spokesperson for the Swiss Foreign Ministry (EDA) told Swiss media.
Switzerland has spent more than 7 million Francs (€7.5 million) since 2016 to finance trade training establishments in Eritrea. Around 350 people per year were trained as carpenters, metalworkers and electricians.
The aid was designed to motivate the African country to co-operate better on migration, primarily to take back citizens who had unsuccessfully requested asylum in Switzerland.
Despite that, an external review commissioned by the Swiss State has now shown these goals were not reached. Eritrea continued to only accommodate citizens who returned voluntarily, not those who were forcefully deported.
The review concluded that the Eritrean Government was not interested in a “dialogue on migration”.
Equally, the other goal of the aid – to improve the local job perspectives of Eritrean youth – had been missed.
“The impact was limited since there are few private enterprises in Eritrea and the choice of profession is restricted,” the EDA said.
Eritrea’s economy has been largely directed by the repressive authoritarian administration there. Citizens are required to do military service for indefinite periods. The country has sometimes been called “Africa’s North Korea”.
There are more than 43,000 Eritreans living in Switzerland, according to state statistics. Switzerland has around 9 million inhabitants in total.
More than 200 Eritreans are currently obliged to leave the country while another 7,000 have been admitted on a provisional basis only.
In 2023, the Swiss parliament decided that the state should deport illegal immigrants from Eritrea to third countries if their government did not take them back.
In December 2023, a project to send the Eritreans to Rwanda was voted down by parliament citing legal reasons.
So far, the Swiss Government has not found any country willing to accept the deportees.
