Lost in translation? The European Convention on Human Rights at the Court of Arbitration for Sport

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is not known as a human rights court. Instead, its primary focus is on applying and interpreting the regulations of international (and sometimes national) sport governing bodies (SGBs). It is only recently that the intersection between the CAS jurisprudence and human rights has become of interest in the academic literature and public debates. In particular, the Mutu and Pechstein decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in October 2018 made clear that the CAS does not escape the indirect scrutiny of the Strasbourg court. Nevertheless, until today, very few publications have been dedicated to the interplay between the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the CAS. This paper aims to contribute to remedying this want by charting the CAS awards in which a reference to the ECHR or a decision of the ECtHR was made and tracing the impact and function of such references in the CAS jurisprudence. The findings highlight the various functions of the references to the ECHR in CAS awards, the discrepancies between some of the interpretations of the ECHR advanced by the CAS and the ECtHR’s own understanding of the Convention, and the limited success of appellants to challenge SGBs’ decisions on the basis of the ECHR. The paper concludes by arguing that the CAS would need to be institutionally reformed in order for human rights to act as an effective check on the transnational power of SGBs in CAS proceedings.