More than ten years ago the participation of Swiss businesses in the transatlantic slave trade was the subject of a number of initiatives in the Swiss federal parliament (Nationalrat), as well as in some of the cantonal parliaments. The parliamentary interpellations were linked to the 2001 UN conference in Durban, South Africa, at which there was a debate on African demands that former slave-trading nations provide compensation. In September of that year Jean-Daniel Vigny, then the Swiss human rights representative at the UN, had observed that such demands presented no problem for Switzerland, since Switzerland had ‘had nothing to do with slavery, slave trade or colonialism’. The parliamentarians who raised the question insisted that there was no way in which such a moral ‘blank check for Switzerland’ could be justified, given the energetic opportunism of Swiss merchant houses in the period of the trade.

In answer to the parliamentary questions the Swiss federal government (Bundesrat) did not deny that ‘various Swiss citizens’ had been ‘involved to a greater or lesser degree in the transatlantic slave trade’ – a fact which the Bundesrat ‘most deeply regrets’. But the government also insisted that Switzerland had ‘never been a colonial power’ and in that sense differed fundamentally from the colonial powers ‘at the level of responsible action’. The participation of Swiss individuals in the slave trade was thus admitted, while at the same time a clear distinction was made between the responsibility of the state and public authorities on the one hand and that of private individuals and firms on the other. The Bundesrat was making clear that official Switzerland bore no guilt for the tragedy of the slave trade.

In addition, the Bundesrat recalled in its statement that Switzerland had helped to frame the declaration and the action plan that emerged from the World Conference against Racism in Durban. Both documents characterise slavery and the slave trade, apartheid and genocide as ‘crimes against humanity’. Moreover, the Swiss government declared that ‘injustices perpetrated [in Switzerland] in the era of colonialism and slavery [must] be critically acknowledged and processed’.

A critical response to the past was indeed a long overdue, since Jean-Daniel Vigny's statement echoed the official Swiss version: How could a small country, far from the Atlantic coast and with no colonial history, have been involved in the slave trade?