Ursula Cassani

Corporate Responsibility and Compliance Programs in Switzerland

This chapter analyzes the criminal law mechanism that has been developed in Switzerland in order to encourage companies to develop compliance programs and prevent corruption. It highlights how the introduction of criminal corporate liability has established a direct link between criminal sanctions and the obligation to introduce preventive measures which may take the form of anticorruption compliance programs. The chapter illustrates the historical development of the Swiss anticorruption legal framework, commencing from the original provisions of the Swiss Criminal Code of 1937, under which the bribery of a public official was already considered a federal offense, and arriving at the amendments introduced in 2005, which made innovations in the system in order to comply with the obligations under the Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention on Corruption 1999. Finally, the chapter sets out a general evaluation of the impact of corruption in Switzerland and illustrates the issues recently arising from the landmark Alstom case.

The Etiology of Juvenile Delinquency: The United States and Switzerland Compared

Both Switzerland and the United States are highly affluent societies and rank consistently among the top five countries in the world in per capita income, both are Western democracies, both are highly urbanized, and both are highly industrialized. Thus, it is quite surprising to discover that Switzerland has much lower rates of crime and delinquency than is the case for the United States, a fact which is especially true for violent crimes. This paper attempts to explain the sources of the differences in crime rates between the two countries and gives special attention to a comparison of juvenile misconduct in the two countries. In the first section, difficulties are discussed concerning the measurement of crime and delinquency in Switzerland, a country which collects few data on social problems in general. Some general trends are shown to be clear, however, including marked increases in drug abuse and suicide cases among the young in Switzerland. In the subsequent section, previous explanations of crime i...