PAGE 27
EMBEDDING THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF ATHLETES BRENDAN SCHWAB Brendan Schwab LL.B MBA is the Executive Director of the World Players Association based in Nyon, Switzerland (as an autonomous sector of UNI Global Union). He graduated from the University of Melbourne Law School in 1992 and has worked as a player association official and lawyer for 25 years. @BrendanSchwab
We need to take back the beauty and the humanity of sport! 1
There is a powerful contradiction that pervades sport globally. Its governors insist that sport is unlike anything else, so special that it deserves to exist in an autonomous vacuum.2 With the same breath, those custodians ‘place sport at the service of humanity…to promote peace’,3 for ‘the practice of sport is a human right’.4 For over 50 years, sport has embedded autonomy, but not humanity.5 The consequences have been tragic. Since at least 1968, widely documented instances of human rights harms have occurred in the course of organising mega-sporting events including the Olympic Games and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. These violations disproportionately affect local communities, workers and vulnerable groups such as women, members of the LGBTI community and children.6 Further, sporting norms, governance failures and inadequate reporting and dispute resolution processes have ‘rendered
athletes inherently vulnerable’ to human rights harms7 including racism, gender discrimination, abuse of labour rights, bullying, sexual abuse and child abuse.8 The abuse of migrant workers in Qatar on construction sites connected with the 2022 FIFA World Cup proved to be a tipping point that compelled the international community to demand that sport addresses its adverse human rights impacts.9 In an open letter dated 11 June 2014 to then FIFA President Sepp Blatter, Professor John Ruggie, the architect of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs),10 and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote that ‘[a]ll countries face human rights challenges, but more effective and sustained due diligence is clearly needed with respect to decisions about host nations and how major sporting events are planned and implemented’.11 Accordingly, major international Sports Governing Bodies (SGBs) such as FIFA should ‘[m]ake an explicit commitment to respect human rights and establish a strategy for integrating a human rights approach based on the [UNGPs] into the [SGB’s] operating procedures’.12
