The Court of Arbitration for Sport (“CAS”) has been in existence for over 30 years, with the first case being submitted in 1986. In this time sport has increasingly become a multi billion-dollar industry and the number of parties using the CAS is growing every year. This is illustrated by the fact that since 1986 over 3,000 requests for arbitration have been filed and 407 of these were filed in 2013 alone.
This article will briefly outline what the CAS does, from where it derives its authority and provide an overview of how it works.
What is the CAS?
The CAS was the brainchild of the International Olympic committee (“IOC”) and its statute came into force on 30 June 1984. Despite it links to the IOC, the CAS is not connected to any other sporting bodies, particularly following reforms in the early 1990’s. It is an independent institution, and the ‘awards’ that it makes have the same authority as a Court decision.
How does it work?
Arbitration is a form of alternative dispute resolution where parties submit a dispute to the arbitrator(s) and agree to be bound by the ‘award’. For a dispute to be heard in the CAS it needs to be sports related, directly or indirectly and the parties must agree in writing that the case is to be submitted, which can either happen prior to the dispute has arisen or afterwards. Most often it is agreed in a commercial contract or contained in a sporting bodies regulations that the CAS will apply when a dispute arises. Once the CAS makes an award, there are very limited avenues for further appeal.
Broadly speaking there are three different types of arbitration at the CAS:-
- Ordinary Arbitration Procedure
This procedure applies to first instance disputes (ie: those not appealed) and parties wishing to submit a dispute to the CAS must send a request for arbitration to the CAS Court office. This type of arbitration applies to around 10% of the caseload and usually takes around 6 – 12 months. Each party chooses one arbitrator from a list provided by the CAS and these two arbitrators agree on who will be president of the panel of arbitrators (“Panel”). If they can’t agree, then the President of the Ordinary Arbitration Division makes this selection. The parties involved in the dispute agree on what national law applies, and if no agreement is reached then Swiss law will apply (The CAS head office is based Lausanne, Switzerland).
- Appeal Arbitration Procedure
This procedure accounts for around 90% of the CAS caseload, and the CAS is called to rule disputes where a decision has already been made by a sports organisation, regulatory body or disciplinary panel (provided there is a provision for recourse to the CAS within the charter/rules of the sporting body in question).
A party (once it has exhausted all internal appeals avenues) can submit a statement of appeal and each party chooses one arbitrator with the President of the panel being chosen by the President of the Appeals Arbitration Division (in some instances a sole arbitrator can be appointed). Once the appeal file is transferred to the panel an award must be made within 3 months. The arbitrators make their award based on the relevant code or regulations of the sporting bodies.
A good example of this procedure is the recent appeal by the Russian Paralympic committee, which appealed against the decision by the International Paralympic committee to exclude Russian athletes from the Paralympic games. This appeal was dismissed.
- The Ad Hoc Arbitration Procedure
As the name alludes too, Ad Hoc divisions of the CAS are set up for winter and summer Olympic games. It then has jurisdiction over disputes that arise during the games or in the ten days preceding the opening ceremony (Article 1 CAS Ad Hoc Rules). It works in a similar way to the appeals procedure above but it is designed to provide a resolution in a swift manner to reflect the time scale of the competition in question. For instance a ruling on whether an athlete can compete will be made prior to their event starting.
An example of this during the Rio Olympics, was when on 3 August 2016 the ad hoc division dismissed the appeal of the Russian Weightlifting federation, against its suspension for doping in accordance with the rules of the International Weightlifting Federation.
For more information the Court of Arbitration for Sport visit the website:-
http://www.tas-cas.org/en/index.html
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