Article 190 of the Swiss Federal Constitution states that federal statutes and international law are binding on the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. In consequence, the courts are not empowered to review the constitutionality of federal statutes, but will, where possible, construe statutes so as not to create a conflict with the Constitution. The courts can suspend the application of federal statutes that conflict with international law, but tend to exercise this power cautiously and deferentially: In Schubert (BGE 99 Ib 39), the Federal Supreme Court refused to do so because Parliament had consciously violated international law in drafting the statute at issue.
The Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation of 18 April 1999 is the third and current federal constitution of Switzerland. It establishes the Swiss Confederation as a federal republic of 26 cantons (states). The document contains a catalogue of individual and popular rights, delineates the responsibilities of the cantons and the Confederation and establishes the federal authorities of government.
The reason traditionally given for the lack of judicial review is the Swiss system of populardemocracy: If 50,000 citizens so demand, any new statute is made subject to a popular referendum. In this sense, it is the people themselves that exercise review.
Popular democracy is a notion of direct democracy based on referendums and other devices of empowerment and concretization of popular will. The concept evolved out of the political philosophy of Populism, as a fully democratic version of this popular empowerment ideology, but since it has become independent of it, and some even discuss if they are antagonistic or unrelated now. Though the expression has been used since the 19th century and may be applied to English Civil War politics, at least the notion is deemed recent and has only recently been fully developed.
Democracy is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. In a direct democracy, the citizens as a whole form a governing body and vote directly on each issue. In a representative democracy the citizens elect representatives from among themselves. These representatives meet to form a governing body, such as a legislature. In a constitutional democracy the powers of the majority are exercised within the framework of a representative democracy, but the constitution limits the majority and protects the minority, usually through the enjoyment by all of certain individual rights, e.g. freedom of speech, or freedom of association. "Rule of the majority" is sometimes referred to as democracy. Democracy is a system of processing conflicts in which outcomes depend on what participants do, but no single force controls what occurs and its outcomes.
A referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is invited to vote on a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new law. In some countries, it is synonymous with a plebiscite or a vote on a ballot question.
The situation described above for Swiss federal law applies mutatis mutandis to the constitutional and legal systems of the individual cantons. However, owing to the derogatory power of federal law, federal courts as a matter of course exercise judicial review on cantonal law, as well as on federal executive law (ordinances, executive orders etc.).
Mutatis mutandis is a Medieval Latin phrase meaning "the necessary changes having been made" or "once the necessary changes have been made". It remains unnaturalized in English and is therefore usually italicized in writing. It is used in many countries to acknowledge that a comparison being made requires certain obvious alterations, which are left unstated. It is not to be confused with the similar ceteris paribus, which excludes any changes other than those explicitly mentioned. Mutatis mutandis is increasingly replaced by non-Latin equivalents, such as without loss of generality, but is still used in law, economics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy. In particular, in logic, it is encountered when discussing counterfactuals, as a shorthand for all the initial and derived changes which have been previously discussed.
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