25 October 2024
Football at a Crossroads
The CJEU shook the world of football with its Diarra ruling on Friday, October 4. The impact of the ruling is all but a surprise for me. In a way, the FIFA transfer system was always on shaky legal grounds in terms of EU internal market law. Now, the chickens have come home to roost and key parts of the football transfer system have been brutally set aside. I aim to explain why the Diarra ruling marks a crucial turning point for football, its economy and even its identity. Continue reading >>
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11 October 2022
IOC adds Human Rights Punch to the Lex Olympica
On 9 September 2022, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) published its long-awaited “Strategic Framework on Human Rights”. The new Framework presents an overarching approach as well as concrete action plans for the IOC to address their human rights risks. This blogpost highlights both the potential of the Framework to change the way the IOC operates and the Olympics are organised and the many unknowns remaining regarding its actual transformative impact and concrete implementation in practice. Continue reading >>
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20 July 2022
Constitutionalizing the Court of Arbitration for Sport
Claudia Pechstein is an exceptional athlete. On ice, she seems immortal, skating through her 8th Winter Olympics in February 2022 in Beijing. In the court room, she has shown the same determination and refused to back down from a bitter and expensive legal struggle. The most recent decision in Claudia Pechstein's legal odyssey, a decision by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court, is interesting beyond the German context because it concerns one of the most active and at the same time under-researched global courts: The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Continue reading >>
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04 February 2022
Speaking up in Beijing or not?
The Beijing Winter Olympics might constitute a boiling point for the ongoing debate on the freedom of expression of athletes and fans participating in international sporting competitions. This blog symposium brings this debate to a more general audience interested in issues related to human rights, constitutionalization of transnational legal processes and private governance. As an introduction to the contributions, our blog highlights a number of fundamental points which will be at the heart of this discussion. Continue reading >>
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12 January 2021
Verticality and Struggles over Human Rights
How do different legal orders interact vertically? Is this interaction marked by conflict and contestation, or by compromise and collaboration? This panel looks at three different such interactions: between domestic courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; between regional human rights courts and United Nations Treaty Bodies; and between Swiss domestic law and the lex sportiva. Continue reading >>
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04 July 2019
FIFA and Human Rights: Introduction to the Symposium
In this blog we provide a brief introduction to the symposium by going through FIFA’s human rights impacts, policies, and responsibilities. Continue reading >>
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10 June 2016
The Pechstein case: Transnational constitutionalism in inaction at the Bundesgerichtshof
How independent is the Court of Arbitration for Sport, or the international sport governing bodies (SGB) in general? This question was at the heart of the Pechstein case before the German Federal Court (BGH). The BGH considers that the CAS is a true arbitral tribunal in the sense of German civil procedural law and that it is not structurally imbalanced in favour of the SGBs. In this blog post, I will aim at critically unpacking and deconstructing the four arguments the decision is based on, one by one. Continue reading >>10 March 2016