For those who don’t know, if someone is found able to do military but doesn’t want to, they can choose to do Civil Service instead. By law, this is 1.5x the duration of civil service.

An important detail is that normal military service is 245 days, but if you do „Durchdiener“ (all in one continuous block), it’s 300 days.

If you signed up to do Durchdiener, even if you didn’t do a single day of it, and then switch to Civil service, they took the 300 days as a base instead of the 245, leading to 450 days of civil service instead of 368. that’s a full 82 days more, for no real reason!

Last year, they got sued in front of the federal constitution court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) by someone who didn’t like this and the court decided there is no sufficient legal basis for this and told the federal office of civil service to use the 245 days as a base for EVERYONE, even if they technically signed up to Durchdiener. This got confirmed by the same court in a similar but unrelated case a few months later.

This lead to me getting a letter from the civil service office yesterday, telling me my outstanding days will be shortened by 82 days!

Thank you unknown dude who sued them! 🥳

Image of the letter is attached, and here is the legal decision of the court: https://jurispub.admin.ch/publiws/download;jsessionid=CEE9FB5721542131B473361FB2699E8F?decisionId=a7638eec-26ff-4814-9ed5-e2ff29a679a5

25 comments

  4. Oh that’s very interesting! Good that this got resolved.

    > federal constitution court

    Just fyi, it’s not a constitutional court, very explicitely not. It’s the federal administrative tribunal, which is the first instance for cases relating to administrative law (as opposed to business, family, criminal law)

  5. It’s not the first and probably won’t be the last case. Some went to the European court too.

  6. Stupid titles on interesting posts like these are the reason I donwvote them.

    This is not called “sue an office”. It’s an appeal against an order. You can sue people or the state, but not the office. You only can appeal orders.

    Get educated son.

  11. That’s amazing, I’m happy for you.
    I’m doing Durchdiener in the military starting July…I’m a bit nervous

  12. I got that letter as well! Turns out I’m done with all my days, and even did 2 days too many.

    ​

    After getting fucked by the civil service and its bureaucratic rules left and right, I’m gonna cherish that win and frame that letter on my wall

  14. So happy that this came in after i just finished my 447 days 🙂 82 days of my life wasted

  15. I had that exact situation but have already completed all of my 450 days. Can I request compensation for that in some way?

  18. Have you started your civil service yet? Cause i wouldve loved an additional 100 days. Its legit free money if you find the right institution to do it. Esepcially if you have a degree, you get paid 80% of what you would get if you would be working in a normal job so around 6 k or something. For doing like 10 hours of work per week and being on your phone the other 25

  20. So does this mean that the civil service in general is now 82 days shorter? So even people who do only civil service from the start now have 82 less days of service in total that they need to do? Or only people who started with Durchdiener?

  22. So now the more interesting question is. If someone does durchdiener and after 245 days he would change to civil service. Would he basically have hacked the system to only have to serve 245 total days in one year without having to serve any more service. That would actually open up many possibilities

  24. There is plenty of shit like that they should be sued for

    I recommend the karlheinz schmidt ruling by the ECHR as a basis for further complaints, coz having only men serve in the army must be discriminatory…

    I’m hoping someone will take this to the EHCR someday.

  25. Am I the only one to think that 250-450 Dienstag is wayyyy to much no matter what? What are we, slaves to our state?

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