Hopefully a 960 owner will chime in with a more proper answer for you, in the meantime maybe this will help.

I got curious about a courtesy light being in the front footwells -now there's a 960 feature I didn't know about until today. That behaviour is indeed a bit puzzling, having the tailgate hinge switch (or trunk latch switch in sedans) operate the front footwell lights. Makes me wonder if a PO did a bit of re-wiring. Are the domelights also on? I'd expect the footwell lights to be on a delay timer associated with the domelights.

I managed to find an online copy of the 1996 960 green electrical manual (at cardiagn.com, TP3913202, over 200 pages). It clearly shows those footwell lights have their own built-in switches, so there's one option to turn them off when you're camping with the tailgate/trunk open. Most curiously, it doesn't show them getting a ground connection through a door switch as one would expect. Now I'm pretty good at reading green electrical manuals, so either I'm missing something obvious or else the manuals are wrong (could be either).

The manual shows the footwell lights getting their power directly from the battery through fuse 13 on the left side fuse panel which in turn gets power through fuse 2 in the main fuse/relay box. That part makes sense. What doesn't overly make sense is having the ground side of the footwell lamps going straight to a common chassis ground without going through a left side or right side door switch, let alone a tailgate/trunk switch or any other switch.

I'll be interested to know the answer if these actually work just as the wiring diagrams seem to indicate.
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Dave -still with 940's, prev 740/240/140/120 You'd think I'd have learned by now