Swiss Reject Harsh Asylum Laws - Just

Switzerland yesterday rejected by the narrowest margin the toughest refugee and asylum rules in the industrialised world in a cliff-hanger referendum that risked setting the country on a collision course with the rest of Europe.

The nationalist proposal, tabled by the rightwing Swiss People's party (SVP), would in practice have meant that all refugees arriving overland would automatically be turned back to the EU country they arrived from. It was defeated by just 2,754 votes out of more than 2 million .

The SVP, a minor populist party in the four-party coalition riding high on the kind of xenophobic law-and-order platform that propelled Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn to prominence in France and the Netherlands, aimed to cut down on the £428m the country spends every year on refugees and halt a rising tide of economic immigration.

It said that since only some 10% of asylum applications in Switzerland are successful, the majority of the 20,000-odd refugees arriving in the country each year must be there for economic reasons. The debate was fuelled by media allegations that African immigrants are responsible for much of Switzerland's drug-dealing.

The proposal would have entailed any refugee arriving via a persecution-free country - in practice, all of Switzerland's neighbours - being automatically denied refugee status and sent back across the border.

In proportion to its population, Switzerland had by far the most asylum applications of any European country between 1994 and June 2001: 267 per 10,000 inhabitants, far ahead of the Netherlands (179), Germany (96), Britain (77) and France (34).

Opponents feared the rules would have made Switzerland a political shelter only for the wealthy, because they would have had to be able to pay for a flight to get there direct and fund their own upkeep while their application was being assessed. Refugee workers say the proposal would have forced asylum-seekers into crime by denying them work and slashing their benefits.

The number of people applying for refugee status last year was 17% more than in 2000, but well below the peaks of the late 1990s, when there was a big rise of refugees fleeing the war in Kosovo.

The country has a long tradition of hospitality, having in the past welcomed the likes of the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the future Czech president Thomas Masaryk, the German writer Thomas Mann and the Italian royal family.

During the second world war, it was also a haven for allied airmen escaping from occupied territory; but an unattainable objective for Jews fleeing persecution, who were turned back at the border. Recent claims that Swiss companies and banks profited from Hitler's Germany and Holocaust victims have cast further shadows on the neutral country's humanitarian reputation.