Old news from 2021, but the implementation day finally arrived
Until now, Switzerland used the characters in the ISO 8859-15 norm for all civil documents.
From 01.01.2025 birth or marriages certificates, passports, school certificates can also use these characters (Latin Extended-A norm)
The request for name changes are possible since 11.11.2025.
More details in DE/FR/IT from the Swiss Justice Office here: Caractères spéciaux dans les noms de personnes
And about time too! It’s a matter of resepct, imo.
While the passport holder is supposed to give “the truth and nothing but the truth” a centimeter difference in body size would be attempted fraud, the governments are free to mess with names as they like.
There are numerous asylum seekers who live with a false name here due to the first (Swiss) person at reception camp not understanding/being able to write a name correctly. No matter how they tried later, they were told this can’t be changed.
Ah, thank you! I remember reading about this, I guess in 2021, but I haven’t looked up its status recently.
I really enjoyed the “Eastern European names ‘westernised’ by computer glić” title in the middle of the article.
-Liquid Papirić
I am interested in some references about the claim. I say this because:
I wish there was a globally recognized ID number assigned once for life and transferable across nationalities and civil registries
Your post is daunting.
As to your point 3: I figured if documents (and even a N-permit is a document not to mention alle the paperwork behind an asylum-case) can finally be changed, the mistakes the personel makes at the Empfangsstellen could be corrected. Silly me.
But the issue sure exists, ignorance does not make it disappear.
Absolutely not! I hope that never happens.
Absolutely not! I hope that never happens.
Why? Without going into too many details, for me it’s so much pain to carry over across countries a name originally given in a Cyrillic alphabet, later modified and adopted by another Central European country following it’s specific orthographic rules and diacritics, considering that all (?) countries require me to give a name from the country of origin where it’s not updated and can’t because I am afraid of going there. It’s such a mess.
And then even if a most generic situation, there’s no practical use of forcing a Swiss to deal with Polish, Hungarian, Czech or whichever diacritics just for the sake of being proud to keep the original name, it always goes in the same fashion:
So IMHO one of useful things international orgs could do is to assign us a unique ID or at least on demand, to be respected by civil registries who agreed to it.
I see your point. And you describe exactly the problem I have in mind.
I personally don’t like your solution as I just don’t like “numbering humans”. Animals have numbers (tucked to their ears) and I know for a fact that many Asylum seekers would feel very bad about this.
But - as you mentioned - on demand it might be a solution. Would the nurse then call out “Mr. 359857146 the Doctor is ready for you now” and you would feel better?
Or do you mean - and that would be better imo - that your name is registered in all possible languages of the world under your personal number? You move to a different country, they can take it from there?
I know it doesn’t help but here in Switzerland people muck up my name constantly. They did it with my maiden name and they do it now and both names are short, very simple and are spoken exactly as they’re spelt. I’ve come to the conclusion, it’s a “Volkssport”. They would find a way to muck up my number too.
I think we could treat names as aliases, ie. Szilvia would become Sylvie if she’s okay with that when getting a residence permit or a passport, while for all situations where it’s important to prove that “me is me” (civil registry, pension, you name it), the ID could be benefitial.
I am not a lawyer and I don’t know who could have such an authority to make it happen but for the situation where people have grounds to be afraid of being tracked, well, a solution could be that there’s a neutral body that can give a new ID in such cases, taking over the role of an original civil registry 
Or keeping a secret mapping of old ID → new ID (my fantasy develops further on, it’s night time…) =)
Or people can just show some decorum and call the lady Szilvia (if she’s okay with being called by her first name 
). I go back to my point, it’s a matter of respect. And I don’t support simplifying things for stupid and/or lazy people in general. And government computers should be able to write all languages, therefore also transfer all names into the specific country’s typefae. We live in the 21st century ffs.
I just translated my first name into Arabic and it looks much prettier 
But I let your fantasy do it’s work and wait what you come up with in the morning as the tracking problem in your number-sysem is a serious one and you should solve it.
Some people already do this; I have an acquaintance whose name is spelled differently in German and she goes by that name now, as it was too funny and annoying to watch the Swiss always misspelling or mispronouncing her first name, which is not some exotic name, mind…amazing how they can’t manage to pronounce a classic name just because it’s spelled a bit differently in another language.
Let’s assume this forum is once visited by a resourceful person capable of implementing my proposal and s/he has an “Eureka” moment =)
As for tracking let’s define the problem here. What is an exact issue here?
I guess it’s the latter issue.
I propose the following process.
John Smith requests an international universal ID to be assigned to him in his home country as he thinks it could be useful in future.
He is unfairly persecuted in his home country and flees abroad.
In an abroad country he is granted an asylum status.
Let’s assume there’s a neutral mediator in the between, some sort of a UN body, for all in and out requests associated with the universal ID.
As a part of the asylum process, the host country anonymously (to not compromise the geo location of a refugee) takes a snapshot on the civil registry data via the original universal ID, then requests to freeze it, requests a new universal ID and assigns the previously captured snapshot to it.
From now on the host country is the “owner”/home civil registry for such a person.
His original country may not make any operations on the frozen identifier as the mediator would not let them to go through.
Well, well, someone’s been sleepless in Switzerland.
I had typed a detailed answer, then it got lost. So a shorter one now:
yes, it’s the latter.
Yes, internally they already reduced me to the AHV-number; taxes, health insurance …
Then this darn biometric passport. Totally free to decide, right? Nobody has to give their fingerprints. You just stay put the rest of your life. This used to be called blackmail.
Now your solution kind of missed the actual problem to be solved: How is a name in Cyrillic alphabet (to take your original example) written in a country with a different alphabet?
The other thing is, these numbers too will be changed during a life time?
And the whole system you lay out is based on trust (a dangerous notion these days) and on an UN body that none of the UN-members have direct access to. Suuuure.
I’m not convinced. My fil would say “you tried”.
My point was, if there was a universal identifier assigned at birth (some sort of a code, that is generated according to a single standard and unique), it wouldn’t matter to a letter precision, how a name travels or even changes across orthographic systems and alphabets =) Of course, some countries wouldn’t be civilised enough to adhere to this standard, then citizens of such countries should be treated in a relaxed manner in civilised ones =)
The notion of UN and trust comes from my weak attempt at solving the privacy issue, on this I indeed give up at this point =) I am not sure there’s a much higher privacy with the current name system anyways.
You are “arguing” against a unique numeric identifier, while at the same time trying to solve the problem that a name cannot be written in a unique way across alphabets.
For the transliteration issue, there is simply no solution. You have to accept that by changing country your name will not be spelled the same and people would muck it up. Imposing additional scripts will just make it worse.
The IATA in their wisdom imposed a “Latin” name for everyone (machine readable part of the passport), each country is free to write whatever latin variant for their citizens. For chinese taiwan you can even choose what english name you have there. This is merely an indication of your name in latin (for facilitating air travel), however in practice you have little chance of using a different one eg in a bank, who insist “name as on passport”.
(PS: IATA also mandates, for date of birth on passports, the use of 00 for day or month when the info in unknown, Switzerland was perhaps the only country to follow this standard to the letter, however they stopped as the few people affected were finding it difficult to travel, book tickets, open accounts etc with a date of birth which had 00 as the month,… Just shows that international “attempts” to standardize things don’t work. )
Given that ‘œ’ is in the new set but not the old set, it’s surprising that this was not supported before, given that one of the main Swiss languages, French, uses ‘œ’
