Swiss police TIGRIS unit, World Cat Day, Swiss-corruption.com & Debian

In 1990, an Italian newspaper declared 17 February to be World Cat Day. As it turns out, there are various world cat days around the world, with Japan and Russia both set to celebrate their cat days in the weeks ahead. Full list of cat days. Of course, if you serve one of these creatures or if you are a social media addict, every day can be cat day.

The Italian world cat day is respected in Switzerland, especially in the Canton of Ticino, where Italian is one of the national languages. On top of that, the Canton of Ticino hosts the Swiss Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona, where everybody from cat burglers to war criminals can bring their appeals before the jurists, for better or worse.

In 2002 and 2003, there was global ridicule of a Swiss jurist, Francois Dessaux, who ordered the censorship of web sites like swiss-corruption.com, so I brought it back. The original web sites had been created by Gerhard Ulrich, a human rights activist who had been ripped off by corrupt jurists. Sound familiar?

Around the same time, the Swiss federal prosecutor had established a secret police force, operating under the code name TIGRIS. Switzerland is well known for the Saint Bernard dogs and it appears they chose a cat theme for their secret police because nobody would believe it. Think about it for a moment, if I walked into a doctor's clinic in Australia and told them that a secret police unit with cat badges was looking for me, there is some chance I would be medicated or even confined to a psychiatric institution.

Nonetheless, after seven years of hiding under sofas and behind bookcases, the TIGRIS unit finally flexed their claws in public for the first time in 2009 to arrest the human rights activist Gerhard Ulrich at the railway station in the city of Vevey.

Swiss authorities have subsequently revealed that this commando unit of just fourteen cat police have been funded with close to three million Swiss Francs per year to carry out undercover operations that nobody is allowed to talk about.

Why on earth does any regime want to establish police units that operate in such secrecy? Out of 130 missions conducted by TIGRIS, their wikipedia page only discloses less than 10 missions involving organized crime or terrorism. Out of the remaining 120 missions that have never been mentioned, how many more involve non-violent political targets and human rights activists like Gerhard Ulrich?

The Software Freedom Institute published a detailed blog about the largely unqualified and inexperienced hillbilly judges appointed by political parties in Switzerland. Given their obligations to the political parties that have the power to sack them, the judges are using police units like TIGRIS to discourage, detain or discredit their political rivals. This is not a healthy way to live at all.

This is a scary subject not just for Switzerland but for all of Europe. Switzerland is part of the Schengen zone and the Swiss jurists and Swiss police carved out a range of data-sharing agreements with other European countries. People would be horrified to know this type of thing is happening again. After all, the Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989, my birthday, and many people rightly believed that was the end of the Stasi, the SS and all of this nonsense. But it is still going on right under our noses in Switzerland and they are using the imagery of cute furry animals to sugar-coat it.

In 2010, we adopted two cats, Floe and Tiggie. Tiggie would be horrified to know that a secret police unit called TIGRIS were using her name to pursue politcal targets. If Tiggie hadn't been run over by a car, she would use all four paws to run non-stop from Zurich to Geneva and scratch at the door of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) demanding trademark protection for the name Tiggie and any other Tiggie-like names that could cause confusion in the minds of the public.

I've never seen a real cat trying to arrest a suspect, usually they simply kill things without a second thought. Real cats would be embarrassed about the police TIGRIS unit tarnishing their reputation for lethal efficiency.

The TIGRIS cat imposters finally caught up with Mr Ulrich in 2009 and he was put in prison for four years for publishing the inconvenient truths about Switzerland's kangaroo courts. Being a Swiss-Australian, I acquired the swiss-corruption.com domain name on World Cat Day to put these kangaroo courts and human rights issues back in the spotlight.

Surveillance skills

TIGRIS police badge

From the TIGRIS page on Wikipedia.

Not a kitten any more