Zurich Police Keeping “Suitors’ Register”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31590, 30 January 1968, Page 8

Zurich Police Keeping “Suitors’ Register”

(N.I. F.A. -Reuter) ZURICH. Swiss resentment is mounting against a “suitors’ register” in which Zurich police are keeping details of men seen talking to prostitutes who frequent certain districts of the country’s largest city. The Criminal police chief, Dr Walter Hubatka, has reported an increasing number of complaints from irate citizens whose sleep was disturbed by the early-morning noise made by cruising cars in which men seek prostitutes. Fining the. prostitutes had had no‘ effect, said Dr Hubatka,, and he was tackling the problem from a different angle. . For the last few months Zurich policemen and detectives under his control have had instructions to ask any man seen talking to a prostitute for his identity papers, so that his name and other details can be entered in the “suitors’ register” kept at police headquarters. The name of the man goes into the register whether his encounter with the prostitute takes place in a car or on foot, and irrespective of whether' any public nuisance is caused.

The police refuse to reveal how many names appear in the “suitor’s register.” It has been violently attacked, for there is no law forbidding prostitution as such, nor is there any law against men associating with prostitutes. Dr Hubatka considers that his object is not to abolish prostitution, which, he said, was as “old as mankind,” but to end the noise and disturbance in residential areas as men, particularly those using motor-cars, meet prostitutes. A leading Zurich lawyer, Dr Hans Enderli, has publicly criticised the police methods as “seriously illegal.” He recently said in the Zurich dally newspaper, “TagesAnzeiger," that there was no Jaw authorising the keeping of a “suitors’ register.” Appealing to Swiss citizens

to rise In defence of the right to freedom, guaranteed by the country's constitution, he had accused Dr Hubatka of wanting “to lay his hands on this right through his unimaginative measures to combat what he calls the evil of prostitution.” Stream of Letters The “suitors’ register" has brought a stream of letters to newspapers. “in practice, it imposes a curfew,” said one correspondent. “It is surely 'no-one’s business why a man is on the street at a late hour, so long as he is quiet and is not annoying anyone.” Another letter described the “suitors’ register” as “an incredible interference in private life, quite-apart from the possibility that a nonsuitor may find his name in this discreditable police record.”

Some correspondents, however, have approved Dr Hubatka’s action. One of these said: “It is not a question of regarding entering into conversation with a prostitute as an offence in the legal sense,

but of at last seeing to it that all other young women who live in the districts frequented by the prostitutes are not constantly. annoyed by ‘suitors’.”