Commentaries: Art. 150

The committees and the sub-committees appointed by them are, for the fulfilment of their duties, entitled:
1. to invite the Federal Council to attend meetings in order to provide information and to request reports from the Federal Council;
2. to obtain documents from the Federal Council for inspection;
3. to question persons in the service of the Confederation with the consent of the Federal Council.
They have no right to information:
1. from the joint reporting procedure or the deliberations in Federal Council meetings;
2. that is classified as secret in the interests of state security or the intelligence services or the disclosure of which to unauthorised persons may be seriously detrimental to national interests.¹
They shall take appropriate precautions to ensure the preservation of secrecy. They may in particular provide that information that is subject to official secrecy in terms of Article 8 is passed on to only one sub-committee.
In the event of any disagreement between a committee and the Federal Council over the extent of rights to information, the committee may call on the Presiding College of the council to which it pertains. The Presiding College mediates between committee and the Federal Council.
The Presiding College shall have the final decision where there is disagreement between the committee and the Federal Council as to whether the information is required by the committees for the fulfilment of their duties in accordance with paragraph 1.
The Federal Council may submit a report to the committee instead of permitting it to inspect the documents, if there is disagreement between it and the committee as to whether the committee has a right to the information in terms of paragraph 2, where mediation by the Presiding College of the Council proves unsuccessful.
The Presiding College of the Council, when preparing to mediate, may inspect the documents held by the Federal Council and the Federal Administration without limitation.

Amended by No I of the FA of 17 June 2011 (Specification of the Information Rights of the Supervisory Committees), in force since 1 Nov. 2011 (AS 2011 4537;BBl 2011 1817,1839). ↩

Art. 150

Footnotes

Continue your research in ChatGPT or Claude