Is It Legal to Record a Conversation in Switzerland? Art. 179ter StGB Explained

Many people who record a conversation in Switzerland assume the rule works the way it does in the United States or the United Kingdom, where a person who is part of a conversation can normally record it without telling anyone else. Switzerland works the other way around. Secretly recording a private conversation is a criminal offence even when the person doing the recording is one of the people speaking.

This page focuses on that specific situation, a participant who records a nicht öffentlich, non public, conversation without the consent of everyone else in it. That offence sits in Art. 179ter StGB, and it carries a real penalty even though the person recording was never an outsider listening in. It also covers the separate rules for a non participant recording others, for image and video capture, for phone calls handled by a business, and for what happens if you discover a recording was made of you.

It is part of our wider Swiss recording law coverage, itself part of the broader guide to Swiss law.

Information last verified on 21 July 2026. This page provides general legal information about Swiss law and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

The rule almost every reader gets backward

The instinct that a participant can record a conversation freely comes from jurisdictions built on one party consent, where the law is satisfied once a single person in the conversation agrees to the recording. Switzerland does not use that rule for private conversations. Under Art. 179ter StGB, a participant who records a nicht öffentlich conversation without the consent of the other people in it commits an offence, full stop.

This is the fact that separates Switzerland from a one party consent system, and it is also the fact this page exists to correct. A person can be entirely honest about why they recorded something, to protect themselves, to document a dispute, or to have a record of what was actually said, and still have committed the offence, because the statute does not ask why the recording was made.

Art. 179ter StGB: recording your own conversation is still a crime

Art. 179ter StGB punishes a Gesprächsteilnehmer, a participant in a conversation, who records a nicht öffentlich conversation on a Tonträger, a sound carrier, without the consent of the other participants. The same article also punishes keeping, using or passing on a recording that the holder knows or must assume was made this way. The penalty is a Freiheitsstrafe, a custodial sentence, of up to one year, or a Geldstrafe, a monetary penalty.

Consider a worked example. An employee secretly voice records a one on one meeting with their manager to have proof of what was said in a dispute. The employee is a participant in that meeting, so the non participant offence in Art. 179bis does not apply to them, but Art. 179ter does, because the manager never consented to being recorded. The employee's reason for recording, even a sympathetic one, does not change that the recording itself is the act the statute punishes.

Art. 179ter is prosecuted only on complaint, a point covered in full later on this page, and the maximum penalty is genuinely capped at one year or a fine. That is lower than the other offences on this page, because the statute treats a participant's unauthorised recording as less serious than an outsider's, even though both are crimes.

Art. 179bis StGB: when the recording is made by someone outside the conversation

Art. 179bis covers the opposite situation, someone who is not a participant at all. It punishes a person who uses a listening device to listen in on, or who records, a nicht öffentlich conversation between other people, without the consent of everyone taking part. It also punishes exploiting or disclosing something learned this way, and keeping or sharing a recording made this way.

The penalty is higher than Art. 179ter, up to three years in custody or a monetary penalty, because an outsider intercepting a conversation they were never part of is treated as more serious than a participant recording their own conversation. A hidden recorder left running in a room, or a wiretap on someone else's call, falls here rather than under Art. 179ter.

Art. 179quater StGB: photos and video reach further than audio

Art. 179quater is a different offence again, and it covers capture by any Aufnahmegerät, recording device, of a fact from someone's Geheimbereich, their secret sphere, or a fact from their Privatbereich, their private sphere, that is not otherwise freely accessible to everyone, without their consent. Unlike Art. 179bis and Art. 179ter, this offence is not limited to conversations at all, and it can apply to a photograph or video that captures no speech whatsoever.

The penalty matches Art. 179bis, up to three years in custody or a monetary penalty. A camera aimed into a neighbour's private space, or a phone held up to film someone without their knowledge in a place they expect privacy, sits here rather than under the conversation offences above. Our video surveillance page covers cameras in full, including the data protection duties that apply alongside the criminal provision.

What counts as nicht öffentlich after BGE 146 IV 126

Both Art. 179bis and Art. 179ter only apply to a nicht öffentlich, non public, conversation, so the meaning of that phrase decides whether the offence applies at all. In BGE 146 IV 126, decided in 2020, the Federal Supreme Court broadened the test that had applied under older case law, making the offence easier to trigger rather than harder.

The test the court actually applies looks at audience scope. A conversation is non public if, given all the circumstances, the people speaking held a legitimate expectation that their words would not be understandable or accessible to just anyone. It is not a test about whether a recording device happened to be present, or whether the speakers expected to be recorded specifically.

That distinction matters for a common piece of bad reasoning. Someone who assumes a conversation was fair game to record because no recorder was visible, or believes a conversation was automatically protected purely because it happened somewhere private, is applying the wrong test. The real question is how wide an audience the speakers reasonably expected, not whether a machine was in the room.

Under the newer test, even an official acting in an official capacity, a situation older case law had excluded entirely, can hold a conversation that qualifies as non public. The scope of what counts as nicht öffentlich reaches further today than it did before this decision.

Consent: what actually makes a recording lawful

Both Art. 179bis and Art. 179ter turn on the consent of everyone taking part, so a recording made with that consent is not the offence at all. The statute requires the consent of the other participants, but it does not specify a particular form that consent has to take.

Because of that, whether consent was actually given in a specific conversation, and whether it was clear enough to count, is a factual question that depends on what was actually said and understood at the time. A phone system that announces a call may be recorded gives the other side a chance to object, but this page does not confirm exactly how a Swiss court would weigh a specific case, and a reader should not treat silence after such an announcement as automatically equivalent to consent.

Phone calls, video calls, voice notes and in person conversations

The two conversation offences, Art. 179bis and Art. 179ter, are not limited to any one medium. A telephone call, a video call, an in person meeting and a voice message left for someone else can all be a Gespräch, a conversation, for purposes of these articles, and recording any of them without the other side's consent can trigger the offence.

Video calls raise the extra complication covered in the next section, since the audio and video elements of the same call are treated separately under Swiss law. A voice note that captures someone else's non public conversation without their consent, for example a recording made in the background of a call the person did not know was being recorded, follows the same rule as any other recording.

The two exceptions in Art. 179quinquies, and the gap they do not cover

Art. 179quinquies sets out the only two situations where recording a conversation under Art. 179bis or Art. 179ter is not punishable, and both are narrow. The first covers Fernmeldegespräche, telecommunications calls, with Hilfs-, Rettungs- und Sicherheitsdienste, meaning aid, rescue and security services, so a call to an emergency line or a roadside assistance service can fall here.

The second covers business calls whose content is an order, a contract, a reservation or a similar routine business transaction, again limited to telecommunications calls. Both exceptions cover the account holder of the line as well as whoever is actually speaking, and both come with a condition, the recording may only be used as evidence and for nothing else.

Neither exception reaches beyond telephone calls to an in person conversation, so a business meeting or a face to face negotiation gets no shelter here even if its content would otherwise qualify. More importantly, the exception text names only Art. 179bis and Art. 179ter, and it never names Art. 179quater.

That gap is easy to miss and worth stating plainly. A business that records the audio of a customer's order call under the second exception is protected on the audio side, but recording video of that same call has no statutory shelter at all, because the exception simply does not extend to image capture. Treating a video recording as covered because the underlying call would have qualified for the audio exception is a mistake.

The workplace: Art. 328b OR and Art. 26 ArGV 3

An employer's handling of employee data and monitoring sits under two further provisions, separate again from the criminal offences above. Art. 328b OR limits an employer to processing data about an employee only where it concerns their suitability for the role or is needed to carry out the employment contract, with the general data protection statute filling in everything else.

Art. 26 ArGV 3 goes further for monitoring systems specifically. Its first paragraph prohibits outright any surveillance or control system whose purpose is to monitor employee behaviour at the workplace. Its second paragraph allows a monitoring system installed for some other legitimate reason, but requires it be designed and positioned so it does not impair employee health or freedom of movement.

Neither of these two provisions is itself a criminal offence in the way Art. 179ter is. They are enforced through labour law and, for Art. 26 ArGV 3, through cantonal labour inspectorates, running alongside rather than instead of the criminal exposure an employer risks if it actually records a non public conversation with an employee without consent.

Recording a boss, a landlord, a call centre or a doctor

These are the situations behind most of the searches that bring readers to this page, and the same rule applies across all of them. Secretly recording a one on one meeting with your own boss is a participant recording a non public conversation, so Art. 179ter applies unless the boss consented, regardless of how reasonable the employee's motive for recording feels.

A phone call with a landlord about a dispute, a repair or a deposit follows the same rule and does not fall under either Art. 179quinquies exception, since a dispute call is not an order, a contract or a reservation. A call to a company call centre about a billing problem or a complaint sits in the same position, unless the specific call is genuinely limited to placing an order or a reservation, in which case the narrow business exception can apply to its audio only.

A conversation with a doctor during a medical consultation is a non public conversation between participants in the ordinary sense, and nothing in Art. 179quinquies reaches a medical appointment at all. Recording any of these conversations without the other person's consent carries the same exposure under Art. 179ter as recording a stranger, because the statute does not treat some relationships as automatically safer to record than others.

Whether an unlawfully made recording can still be used as evidence

A separate question from whether a recording was made lawfully is whether that recording, once it exists, can be used as evidence in a later case, for example a labour dispute or a criminal complaint about something else entirely. That question depends on Swiss procedural law rather than on Art. 179bis through Art. 179quinquies themselves, and it is not addressed by the facts confirmed for this page.

A reader weighing whether to make or to rely on a recording made without consent should treat this as an open question rather than assume either answer, and should not conclude from anything here that an unlawfully made recording is automatically usable or automatically excluded. Speaking with a lawyer about the specific situation is the only reliable way to answer it.

Penalties and how long exposure lasts

The limitation period, the Verjährungsfrist, is set by Art. 97 Abs. 1 StGB and runs from the length of the maximum penalty an offence carries, not from a fixed number attached to recording offences specifically. An offence with a maximum penalty of exactly three years, which is Art. 179bis and Art. 179quater, carries a ten year limitation period, while an offence with a lesser maximum, which is Art. 179ter at one year, carries a seven year limitation period.

That is a completely different period from the three month Strafantrag deadline covered next, and the two are easy to confuse because both are commonly discussed in the same breath. The limitation period is how long the state has to prosecute at all. The Strafantrag deadline is how long a specific person has to ask for prosecution to begin.

If someone recorded you: the Strafantrag deadline

Art. 179bis, Art. 179ter and Art. 179quater are all prosecuted only auf Antrag, on complaint, so nothing happens unless the person affected files a Strafantrag. Art. 31 StGB sets the deadline for doing so at three months, and that clock starts on the day the person entitled to complain learns who the offender actually is, not on the day the recording was made.

In practice that means someone who suspects they were recorded but does not yet know by whom is not yet on the clock. Once the offender's identity becomes known, the three month window begins, and letting it lapse ends the right to have that specific act prosecuted through a complaint.

A Strafantrag is typically brought to the police or the cantonal Staatsanwaltschaft, the public prosecutor's office. This page does not predict how a specific complaint would be assessed or resolved, since that depends entirely on the facts of the individual case.