European Databases | Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland

The Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland is based in St. Gallen. It currently employs 73 judges and it issues approximately 6,500 judgements a year.

• The Federal Administrative Court was established in 2007 and is a court of first instance that primarily adjudicates appeals against rulings by federal authorities.
• In certain subject areas, the court is also responsible for reviewing cantonal decisions and in some cases also rules on legal actions (Klageverfahren). Insofar as the Federal Administrative Court does not rule as the court of last resort, its rulings can be appealed at the Federal Supreme Court.
• The court is organised in six divisions. They are amongst others infrastructure, finance and personnel, as well as economy, education and competition and asylum law.


• Around two-thirds of the approximately 440 employees have German as their working language, a quarter French and the rest Italian.
• The current president of the Federal Administrative Court is Vito Valenti.
• At the start of the covid pandemic a “Scan Centre” was introduced by the court’s administration to digitalize case files and therefore enable the judges to work from home. What started as an emergency solution developed into a genuine vision namely the transfer to a paper-less working environment till 2025.

• The database of the Federal Administrative Court is called: “Entscheiddatenbank BVGer”. All substantive decisions of the court are published there. Procedural decisions are only published if they are of interest to the public.
• On the homepage of the database, you have a variety of search functions to your disposal. For example, you can filter the decisions by department, date, reference number or keyword.
• Also worth mentioning is the “index of norms” (“Normenindex”). In this section all civil law norms that were cited in the decisions of the Federal Administration Court are listed.


• The decisions are enhanced with different indexes like a keyword index, an index of standards and a decisions index. Furthermore, a colour code highlights keywords that were searched for, descriptions, abbreviations of the court and different sources. Links to other documents concerning laws and jurisprudence can be found as well.

• The decisions are available in html- and PDF-format and only ever in the language of the proceedings.
• The civil law norms are also available in html- and PDF-format but here you can choose between three languages (German, French and Italian), see for example the Swiss Constitution.