A news release from the Federal Tribunal this week did not name the man, described only as an Italian national in his 50s.

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Several high-profile cases have brought international attention to the peculiarities of Swiss immigration law in recent years — from a Muslim couple who were denied citizenship for refusing a handshake to an animal rights activist deemed too annoying for naturalization. While the federal government decides who gets to become a citizen in most countries, applications for naturalization in Switzerland are handled at the local level. Some rural communities even still hold public meetings in which the town’s inhabitants vote on each applicant with a show of hands.

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Often, the decision hinges on whether the person petitioning for citizenship is judged to be Swiss enough — a question that quickly gets into dicey territory. In one particularly controversial 2016 case, a family from Kosovo that met all the other requirements for naturalization were rejected on the grounds that they wore tracksuits in public and did not greet people in passing.

Two years later, officials in the city of Lausanne decided a Muslim couple who declined to shake hands with members of the opposite sex in accordance with their religious beliefs had failed to integrate into Swiss society.

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The Italian expatriate rejected for his lack of zoo knowledge had applied to a naturalization commission in Arth, a lakeside community about 30 miles south of Zurich in central Switzerland. He and his wife had lived in the area for decades — Switzerland requires a minimum of 10 years in residence before a naturalization application can be filed — and first petitioned for citizenship in 2015, along with their two school-aged sons.

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As part of the process, both had to take a citizenship exam to demonstrate how much they knew about Swiss culture. As the Local Switzerland has reported, the country is broken up into cantons, roughly the equivalent of U.S. states, and each offers its own highly specific version of the test. Applicants have been asked to name local movie theaters, sports teams and museums, and about whether they like hiking. An online practice test includes even more arcane questions, such as, “Which traffic engineering project was completed 1980 and considered an engineering masterpiece at the time?” and “Where is the last important port before the Rhin River Falls in Schaffhouse?”

It’s unclear exactly what officials asked the Italian ice cream entrepreneur, but they were apparently displeased to learn that he was not aware that bears and wolves were housed together at the nearby wildlife park in Goldau, which TripAdvisor ranks as one of the area’s top attractions.

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According to Le Matin and 20 Minutes, the man’s teenage son was granted citizenship, but the rest of the family was denied. They appealed, and in 2018, a local administrative court allowed the man’s wife and younger son to be naturalized. But they continued to reject the man himself, claiming he had “minor deficiencies” in his understanding of geography and insufficient knowledge about the area’s culture, as evidenced by his ignorance about zoo animals.

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From the lower court’s point of view, those gaps in knowledge proved the man had failed to integrate with the social and cultural fabric of the region. But in its Monday ruling, the Swiss Federal Tribunal noted the man had been running his own small business for nearly 20 years, so it was unfair to suggest he had not built relationships within the community.

The man had also been dinged for failing to include property he owned in Italy on a tax form, which did not result in any criminal charges and was deemed to be an innocent error, Le Matin and 20 Minutes reported. In their ruling, the Lausanne-based judges chided the local court for putting too much emphasis on arbitrary criteria, saying the applicant’s strengths clearly outweighed his minimal weaknesses.

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The fact that would-be Swiss citizens can appeal their rejections is a fairly new development. Amid a spike in immigration from Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, people from countries such as Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia kept getting their naturalization applications denied, WNYC’s Radiolab reported last year. But immigrants from Italy did not seem to run into the same problems.

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Concerned about what looked like a clear-cut case of discrimination, the Federal Tribunal ruled that towns had to explain why they were rejecting an applicant, and it established that immigrants have the right to contest the decision. That has been an ongoing source of consternation for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which saw the change as an attack on local control.

The issue famously came to a head in 2015, when the small town of Gipf-Oberfrick voted to deny citizenship to Nancy Holten, an outspoken Dutch vegan who had annoyed her neighbors by claiming that cowbells were inhumane. As Radiolab reported, townspeople saw Holten’s activism as an attack on Swiss traditions, and they repeatedly voted to reject her.