Swiss son, Thai mother: what reunification?
Swiss son, Thai mother: what reunification?
I am the father of a child born in Thailand to a Thai mother to whom I am not married. If our child comes to live with me in Switzerland, will she be able to join us by applying for family reunification?
Colin, Geneva
The law provides that Swiss nationality is automatically passed on to a child whose parent is a Swiss national, provided, of course, that the parent-child relationship is duly established.
Given the nationality of your child's mother, she cannot take advantage of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, which applies only to European or EFTA nationals. The Foreign Nationals Act (LEtr) therefore applies, article 42 of which states that to be eligible for a residence permit, the spouse of a Swiss national and any unmarried children under the age of 18 must be living in the same household as the Swiss national. This means that you will have to be married to the mother of your child and living as a family with her if you want her to be able to come and live in our country.
As family reunification requires a union, it is worth pointing out that, under article 105 of the Civil Code (CC), a marriage celebrated when the spouses do not really want to found a conjugal community but merely to evade the provisions on the admission and residence of foreigners must be annulled. If the Cantonal Population Office suspects fraud, it will contact the competent authority, i.e. the Department of Population in Geneva, to have the marriage annulled.
However, under certain conditions, the Federal Court has accepted that it is possible to extend the residence permit of a foreign parent who separates from his or her Swiss spouse and has neither custody nor parental authority over his or her Swiss child, on the basis of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantees the right to family life. In this respect, our High Court laid down three conditions, namely that there must be particularly strong family ties from an emotional and economic point of view, that this relationship cannot in practice be maintained because of the distance separating the child's country of residence from the parent's country of origin, and that the applicant must have shown irreproachable behaviour in Switzerland.
