Facts
The appellant, a Turkish national born in 1958, married a Turkish national in 1978 and lived with him and their four children in Turkey. After the divorce in 1995, the husband married a Swiss woman and moved to Switzerland, where he received a residence permit. The children followed him in family reunification. In 2001, the husband and children received settlement permits. The appellant remarried her ex-husband in 2001 and moved to Switzerland in 2002, where she received a residence permit. In 2007, she received a settlement permit.
From November 2003, the spouses were supported by social assistance. The migration office revoked the appellant's settlement permit in 2017 due to dependence on social assistance. The appellant appealed to the Administrative Court of the Canton of Zurich, which dismissed the appeal. The appellant then appealed to the FSCA.
Considerations
The FSCA examined whether the revocation of the settlement permit due to dependence on social assistance was lawful. It found that the appellant had never been gainfully employed since her entry into Switzerland and that she and her husband had been supported by social assistance without interruption from November 2003 to the end of September 2018.
The court found that the appellant had caused her own dependence on social assistance, as she had not actively sought to participate in integration programs and had hindered her own employability through inadequate efforts in job searching and language acquisition. The appellant had not been able to demonstrate that she had made sufficient efforts to find a job, and her actual efforts were poorly verifiable.
The court weighed the interests and found that the public interest in ending the stay outweighed the appellant's private interests in…