Federal Supreme Court reviews new vote on women’s retirement age
Published: Thursday, Dec 12th 2024, 05:40
Zurück zu Live Feed
On Thursday, the Federal Supreme Court will decide in public on whether to repeat the ballot on raising the retirement age for women. The people had narrowly approved this on September 25, 2022. According to the complaint, this was based on incorrect figures.
This means that the electorate did not make an informed decision, according to the complaints lodged by the Greens and the SP Women. The figures stated in the voting booklet were based on the incorrect expenditure forecast for the AHV and were therefore misleading.
The parties are calling for the narrow result of 50.6 percent approval of the AHV 21 proposal to be overturned and for the ballot to be repeated.
According to the complainants, the incorrect forecast was the decisive factor in the population agreeing to increase the retirement age for women from 64 to 65. The overly pessimistic figures would have cost women a year's pension.
Expenditure adjusted downwards
On August 6, the Federal Social Insurance Office (FSIO) announced that it had incorrectly calculated the AHV's financial prospects. This led to an inaccurately high forecast of expenditure. This information was included in the voting documents for September 2022 as well as in those for the vote on the 13th AHV pension on March 5 of this year.
As a result, AHV expenditure for 2033 had to be adjusted downwards by four billion francs after the vote. After more precise recalculation, a downward correction of 2.5 billion remained. Suddenly, the AHV was in a better financial position than presented in the voting documents.
Substitute judges on the men's panel
The Minister of the Interior, Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, initiated an administrative investigation after the calculation error became known. The investigation report states that the inflated figures for the AHV financial perspective were not based on a calculation error. Rather, two functions had driven up AHV expenditure in the externally validated calculation program for the AHV financial perspective and thus led to implausible forecasts in the long-term perspective of over ten years.
FSIO Director Stéphane Rossini will step down at the end of June 2025. The former SP National Councillor from Valais took office at the end of 2019.
Two female substitute judges will take part in the public deliberations of the First Public Law Division of the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne on Thursday. In its normal composition, the panel consists only of men. However, the Federal Supreme Court regulations stipulate that "members of both sexes may sit on the panel if the nature of the legal dispute appears to justify this".
©Keystone/SDA
German 
English 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic