Sport Arbitration and Federative Jurisdiction: In Search of a Fair System of Dispute Resolution

The established system of dispute resolution in sport today is based on arbitration (international and national) and jurisdictional bodies of federations and organizations. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has firmly established itself as the authority to which international sports federations, organizations, and sports entities from various national legal orders entrust their disputes. Alongside the multi-sport CAS, there exists a special arbitration tribunal for basketball – the Basketball Arbitration Tribunal (BAT). National sport arbitration systems are also currently under development. For example, since 2021, the National Centre for Sports Arbitration (NCSA), which has been charged with resolving individual labour disputes among other things, has been providing its services to sports entities in the Russian Federation. In addition to arbitration, international, continental, and national sports federations have established jurisdictional bodies to deal with a range of disputes between sub-jurisdictional entities including: disciplinary and ethical, contractual, those related to admission to competition, membership in a federation, and others. Russian sports federations find themselves at different stages of creating their own dispute resolution systems, including the aforementioned national arbitration system. The creation of a procedural framework for dispute resolution has been left to the discretion of the sports federations under which the jurisdictional bodies or arbitral tribunals have been established, though subject to the requirements of national law at the place of the relevant authority. Public policy obliges federations and arbitral tribunals to respect the particular features of the private law process in the establishment of regulations for resolving disputes. Is this sufficient cause for considering the demands of due process and natural justice to have been met by sports legislation enforcement agencies? What is the necessary minimum level of guarantees, and is it possible to define such guarantees for the entities involved in the resolution of sports disputes within the Russian system of justice? Is it realistic to expect effective independence, objectivity, and impartiality on the part of arbitrators adjudicating disputes in sport? Should the jurisdictional bodies of Russian federations and the national sports arbitration tribunal adjudicate disputes ex aequo et bono? And finally, what should authorities and guarantees of a fair system of dispute resolution for sport in Russia look like?