The Swiss Senate’s Committee for Science, Education and Culture has acted on a parliamentary initiative from the House of Representatives to extend its twenty-year moratorium on genetic engineering, which expires at the end of 2025, by two years.

In 2022, parliament asked the government to submit by the end of the first half of 2024, a draft act aimed at introducing a risk-based approval system for new breeding methods like gene editing (CRISPR). Following this, an initiative calling for genetic engineering to be governed by strict rules was launched at the beginning of September, with the initiators being particularly opposed to relaxing the rules for plants modified using new genomic techniques.