Facts

[A.], a Cameroonian national born on June 3, 2000, joined her father in Switzerland in 2012 through family reunification. She has been living in the city of Thun in the canton of Bern since then. [A.] is a native French speaker and attended primary school in French in Bern, as well as the gymnasium (high school) in Biel, where she obtained her Maturité certificate with a focus on biology and chemistry on June 15, 2018. Since September 2018, she has been studying biomedical science as her major and German as her minor at the University of Fribourg.

On June 18, 2018, [A.] submitted a naturalization application to the municipality of Thun. In the naturalization procedure, she was requested to provide proof of her German language proficiency by submitting a language assessment from a recognized language school at the required level. [A.] then submitted her Maturité certificate, which awarded her a grade of 4 (sufficient) in German as a foreign language. However, the Thun Municipal Council did not consider the application, as [A.] had not provided the required proof of language proficiency from a recognized language school.

[A.] then filed a complaint with the Administrative Court of the Canton of Bern, which dismissed the complaint. The court reasoned that the applicant's native French language was not sufficient for naturalization in Thun, and that adequate German language proficiency, which [A.] had not demonstrated, was therefore rightly required.

Considerations

The Federal Supreme Court upholds A.'s complaint. It considers it arbitrary and legally unequal to not recognize A.'s German language proficiency, as evidenced by her Maturité certificate, as sufficient proof of language proficiency for naturalization. The Federal Supreme Court states that the language proficiency required for the Maturité is at level B2.2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which is even higher than the required competencies of level B1 (oral) and A2 (written) for naturalization.

The Federal Supreme Court sees it as contradictory to deny the…