Key facts
Following the vote in favour of the initiative on large-scale immigration on 9 February 2014, the European Union (EU) withdrew Switzerland’s full participation in the Horizon 2020 research framework programme (H2020). Many Swiss researchers thus found themselves excluded from project consortia. In June 2014, the Federal Council decided to directly finance Swiss participation in projects relating to H2020 programmes no longer receiving money from the European Commission (EC) by means of a project by project financing method. Switzerland’s status without full association lasted from September 2014 to the end of 2016. The last requests for commitments for new projects will arrive at State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) in 2018. Due to the multi-year duration of the projects, SERI estimates that it will have to finance and supervise around 1,000 projects involving almost CHF 600 million until around 2024.