BERN - The foreign ministry confirmed the hold to Keystone-SDA after the NZZ am Sonntag published internal emails and minutes. An MSF investigation recorded 59 allegations of sexual violence and exploitation, much of it against Sudanese refugee women and girls. Eighteen staff were dismissed and permanently excluded, six of them from the Swiss section. The newspaper's account, echoed by the Associated Press in June, describes money, jobs or aid sought in exchange for sex. In at least one camp, community leaders imposed a curfew on girls to keep them away from aid workers, not from armed groups. MSF does not dispute the abuse. A spokesman told the news agency the charity had stayed in contact with Bern, but conceded that the full scale of confirmed cases and dismissals was not disclosed "proactively and early enough".
An alert that sat for months
The first email from MSF's Geneva headquarters reached the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation on a Friday in November 2024, late in the working day. Three women were said to have described exploitation in Chad, and the charity said the claims were already under investigation. A meeting was pencilled in for January. Discussions inside the foreign ministry, which Ignazio Cassis leads, did not really resume until June and July 2025. Officials later wrote that they had "no urgent questions", let the exchange drag, and closed the file in the summer of 2025 on the view that the situation was under control. In February 2026, SDC and MSF staff met again on protection from sexual exploitation. Bern even congratulated the charity on what it called exemplary transparency, the Sunday paper reported, still unaware that dozens of cases had been confirmed on the ground.
The Associated Press revelations in June 2026 changed that. The SDC demanded documents. The foreign ministry now says MSF broke its contractual duty to report. Mistrust of the charity inside the administration, the NZZ wrote, is now immense. The outstanding money stays frozen until the new documents have been checked. Further sanctions and an external review are under discussion. From 2027, reporting rules will be tightened for every NGO that partners with the SDC. The charity received about CHF 2 million for the Chad project itself and almost CHF 12 million from Switzerland in 2025.
Why the camps are so exposed
The civil war in Sudan has pushed hundreds of thousands of civilians into eastern Chad since 2023. Aid workers are often the only source of food, work and medicine, which is exactly the leverage the allegations describe. Switzerland's own staff, the Sunday paper argued, were operating in the dark for more than a year after the first warning. The same foreign ministry that kept channels open until a Swiss hostage was freed in Niger last week now has a Geneva flagship charity on a payment freeze. The episode lands as Bern also brings a Swiss Ebola patient home from Nigeria, a reminder of how much of Swiss foreign policy now runs through African health crises.