Swiss officials are continuing to send hundreds of migrants entering from Austria onwards to Basel on the border with France and Germany, according to a report in the NZZ newspaper on Sunday, citing police in St Gallen Canton.
"We are formally allowing onward travel," the newspaper quoted a police officer as saying.
Andrea Lindholz, a spokesperson for the opposition conservative parties in the German parliament, expressed criticism in the same newspaper.
"If these reports are true, Switzerland is pursuing a policy of merely waving people through," she said. National egoism was harming Europe's Schengen free travel area, of which all three countries are members, Lindholz said.
Switzerland's television magazine Rundschau revealed at the beginning of October that the national rail company, the SBB, was providing special carriages for migrants entering the country from Austria through the border town of Buchs in St Gallen Canton.
The migrants were then travelling to Basel via Zurich.
Lindholz said the SBB was effectively facilitating illegal entry into Germany and called for the Swiss authorities to intervene. "Switzerland must fulfil its obligations as a member of the Schengen Area and act against illegal migrants," she said.
A spokesperson for the Swiss state secretariat for migration said there was no legal basis for detaining the migrants, and before proceedings under the European Union's Dublin Regulation could be completed, they would long since have travelled on.
"No Dublin procedure can be implemented for persons who are no longer present," the spokesperson said.
