Six years after Covid, Zurich municipalities gain the right to hold virtual meetings

A WhatsApp group for a city council is not a virtual meeting. Under the proposed rules in Zurich, officials must be able to discuss matters with one another in real time.

The issue came before the Zurich cantonal parliament as municipal authorities, including city governments, school boards and committees, increasingly use digital meetings. During the pandemic, officials joined sessions from home. But the current Municipal Act offers no clear legal basis for that practice.

The law says that authorities must assemble, that members must attend meetings and that a body can make valid decisions when a majority of its members are present. That leaves open several questions: does an online gathering count as an assembly, is a member present when connected through the internet, and are decisions valid if a meeting takes place entirely online or in hybrid form?

In a submission from December 2024, the cantonal government said there was no relevant case law and that legal opinions had reached different conclusions. Its answer was that the law needed to provide clarity.

The proposed amendment would simply state that meetings can take place physically in one location or through electronic means. Justice Director Jacqueline Fehr, a Social Democratic Party politician, stressed that the canton had not initiated the change or sought to impose rules on municipalities. The proposal came from the municipalities themselves through a joint working group. The change, she said, was driven from the bottom up.