Articles for author: Antoine Duval

The Finish Line of Caster Semenya’s Judicial Marathon

Caster Semenya was wronged, and Switzerland – due to the inaction of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (SFSC) – was held responsible by the Grand Chamber (GC) of the ECtHR. This conclusion to a long judicial marathon is an important vindication for an athlete who saw her career destroyed by a process that violated her right to a fair hearing. The case will be remembered as a significant landmark that will affect the field of transnational sports law and governance for years to come.

11. Juli 2025

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How the CJEU Should Supervise the Court of Arbitration for Sport

On 16 January 2025, AG Ćapeta rendered her Opinion in the Seraing case which could have profound effects for transnational governance of sports. AG Ćapeta highlights convincingly the specificities of CAS arbitration, its forced nature and peculiar private enforcement system. She concludes that CAS awards should be deprived of res judicata effect and subject to EU law review. I advocate for a less disruptive approach. Instead of a total devaluation of CAS awards, we should condition the recognition of their bindingness to their compliance with European public policy and fundamental due process rights.

18. Februar 2025

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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.

25. Oktober 2024

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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.

11. Oktober 2022

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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).

20. Juli 2022

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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.

10. Juni 2016

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The Pechstein case: Transnational constitutionalism in action at the Bundesgerichtshof

Constitutional review is not anymore exclusively located where we would traditionally expect it: in national constitutional courts. Functional equivalents to constitutional review play out in various courts as a new legal game of power and counter-power shapes up for the global age. Sport, broadly speaking, is a fruitful field to study the transnationalization of law. I propose to put on constitutional lenses to analyse the current case pitching speed skater Claudia Pechstein against the International Skating Union (ISU) in front of the Bundesgerichtshof.

10. März 2016

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