The NGO Sports Context is initiating the creation of a coordination and advisory center on its base for systematic legal action against Russia's institutional presence in international sports federations.
"Sports Context is initiating the creation of a coordination and advisory center on its base to protect the interests of Ukrainian and international sport. So as not to duplicate the ministry, Ukraine's National Olympic Committee or sports federations, its task is to help national federations professionally exercise their rights within international sports organizations," Sports Context chairman Oleksandr Larin said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday, reading a statement addressed to the country's sports community.
According to him, the center will collect and verify evidence of Russian activity in occupied territories, analyze statutes, identify violated norms, and help prepare appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). It is also proposed to create a single registry of evidence, proceedings, decisions and legal precedents. "The results of this work should be assessed not by the number of meetings and statements, but by the number of cases prepared, proceedings opened, decisions obtained and sanctions applied," the chairman stressed.
Larin said the current response of Ukraine's relevant government bodies to Russia's attempts to return to world sport remains largely declarative, and that the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine has proven organizationally unprepared for systematic legal opposition and the involvement of independent experts. The chairman stressed that the ministry's political leadership has failed to develop a unified strategy or ensure professional legal support together with the National Olympic Committee and national federations.
Sports Context is calling on national sports federations, Ukraine's National Olympic Committee, lawyers and diplomats to join the initiative in order to move from reacting to consequences toward a proactive legal strategy. "The time has come to move from fighting the symbols of Russian presence to fighting its institutional foundation, from political appeals to legal procedures, from constant reaction to proactive strategy," Larin concluded.
For his part, lawyer and sports law specialist Taras Samborsky, first vice president of the Beach Soccer Association of Ukraine, said the International Olympic Committee (IOC) cannot be accused of a lack of system or consistency in its decisions, since all its decisions were made through a defined procedure, based on established facts and with legal support for sports bodies, in relation to established facts and aggressor countries. "This whole time we've expended a great deal of energy trying to… fight the consequences, prevent athletes from competing, deal with unclear regulations and failed attempts at news pegs, some kind of basis for combating phenomena such as the return of Russians to international sport. But, I repeat, no systematic work has been done, and in our view no systematic work is being done today," he said at the press conference.
He said the initiative is therefore about focusing attention exclusively on the legal grounds for creating obstacles to the return of representatives of aggressor countries to the international sporting arena, while noting that the legal factor is only one component of systematic work alongside diplomatic, political and individual efforts.
"We propose to focus our attention within this project exclusively on documenting, properly recording and creating legal precedents to prevent Russian sports organizations from entering the international sporting arena, to prevent them from working within international federations, and to prevent them from operating within the International Olympic Committee. This should form the basis and groundwork for a theoretically possible appeal to international sports arbitration. We stress that recourse to international sports arbitration is the last link, the last outpost that should exist in this fight. The entire fight should take place through mechanisms that exclude the work of Russian national federation representations in international sports organizations, or that maximally complicate their operations there, their representation, their election and their access to decision-making," Samborsky said.
He proposed that representatives of Ukrainian national federations, the sports community, individual athletes, and lawyers who already have experience representing Ukrainian athletes, as well as sports bodies within international institutions, should be the first to join the coordination center's work. It is proposed to form an evidence registry to document facts of violations of the Olympic Charter by Russian federations domestically, which would form the basis and grounds for their exclusion or the restriction of their activity within international federations.
"And only then, if this does not produce results, appeal the decisions of international federations' disciplinary bodies to international sports arbitration. This is exactly the path representatives of the aggressor country chose at the time. This is exactly the path we proposed following from the very beginning. And, it seems, the time has come to start taking certain steps in this direction," Samborsky concluded.
