The death of Elisabeth Kopp, the first woman appointed to Switzerland’s cabinet, was announced on 14 April 2023.
Elisabeth Kopp, 86, died on Good Friday after a long illness, according to SRF.
After being elected to the Federal Council on October 2, 1984, the Zurich native became the first female member. She belonged to the PLR/FDP coalition.
Kopp resigned from the Federal Council in 1989 after it was revealed that she had instructed her husband to resign from a company mentioned in a money laundering investigation. She was informed of the investigation as a Federal Councillor, and disclosing this was considered a breach of official secrecy.
A year after resigning, Kopp was acquitted by Switzerland’s highest court, the Federal Tribunal, because it could not be proven that she knew the official source of the information she shared with her husband. She withdrew from public life at that point and always denied any moral or legal guilt. Her husband was never convicted in the money laundering case, but he was convicted of fraud in 1991 in a completely separate case involving the failure of a firm he ran in the early 1980s.
Kopp had previously studied law at the University of Zurich, where she was the first woman to graduate in 1960.She was an early supporter of women’s suffrage in Switzerland, and she was elected to Zumikon’s municipal council shortly after the canton of Zurich implemented it in 1970.
She became the first woman to serve in Zurich’s cantonal government in 1972, and she was elected mayor of Zumikon in 1974.By 1979, she was a member of Switzerland’s federal parliament, the National Council.
Throughout her political career, Kopp was committed to gender equality and environmental protection, and she was instrumental in modernizing Swiss matrimonial law, introducing data protection laws, and creating criminal law against money laundering. She established a government representative for refugees in 1986.