The Swiss senate on Tuesday on Tuesday voted against a motion calling for foreign funding of mosques in the country to be banned.
Politicians in the upper house voted 29 to 7 against the proposal which had narrowly passed through the lower house Council of States.
The motion had been put forward by Lorenzo Quadri, a senator for the right-wing Ticino League party in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton of Ticino.
The proposal, modelled on rules already in place in Austria, would also have seen imams required to preach in a Swiss national language while compelling Islamic centres to disclose the origin of any funding.
With the motion, Quadri had targeted some 35 mosques and Islamic centres in Switzerland reportedly funded by the Turkish government with the money being used to spread radical Islam, Swiss news portal 20 Minuten reported. [The Local] Read more
