Border: France-Switzerland

• Introduction and factsheets on "Territory projects and institutional bodies"
• Heterogeneous territories
• Mobility and employment of border workers
• Legal framework
• Cooperation programmes
• Levels of governance

Legal framework

The local authorities concerned are backed by a common legal framework. In July 2004, the quadripartite Karlsruhe Agreement (1996) between France, Luxembourg, Germany and Switzerland was extended to apply to the whole of the French-Swiss border. The purpose of this agreement is to facilitate and promote cross-border cooperation between French, German, Luxembourger and Swiss local and regional authorities and local public institutions in their common areas of competence. It enables the authorities to participate in two ways. On one hand they can sign cooperation agreements under which the parties can coordinate their decisions and together produce and manage public facilities or services; on the other hand they can form cross-border organisations such as local cross-border cooperation groupings (LCCG), the members of which can include local and regional authorities located on either side of the borders. The LCCG is governed by the national law applicable to public inter-municipal cooperation organisations of the country where its registered office is located.

The possibility of extending the European grouping of territorial cooperation (EGTC) to French-Swiss cooperation, eagerly awaited by local cooperation participants in order to develop the framework of cooperation, is under examination at European level with the current revision of the European community regulation on the EGTC.

The work of the Council of Europe on a new type of body, the Euroregional Cooperation Grouping (ECG), accessible to the Member States of the Council of Europe, resulted in the signature in November 2009 of the third protocol to the Madrid outline convention** introducing this new cooperation structure.

The protocol came into effect in Switzerland on 1 March 2013 and in France on 1 May 2013. The ECG is a similar structure to the EGTC.

Despite the fact that the border is an external border of the European Union, the differences between the institutional systems (role of the cantons) and the tax and currency differences, the cross-border programmes undertaken in Basle with the formation of a Eurodistrict or in Geneva with the formation of an LCCG bear witness to the willingness to cooperate on this border.