With Russian sport isolated, political neutrality in question

International sport has made political and geopolitical neutrality one of its main reasons for being, swept away in a few days by the war in Ukraine, with very harsh sanctions against Russia, but also against its athletes.

And in the background, with the risk of creating “precedents” that could be invoked in possible conflicts in the world in the future.

End to neutrality in sport?

By recommending the exclusion of Russia and Belarus and their athletes, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) entered an unprecedented path on Monday, which was soon launched by the instances of soccer, the global sport. UEFA and FIFA were followed by many others, such as athletics, the king of Olympic sports, and ice skating, a Russian specialty.

In the opinion of Pim Vershuuren, a researcher in the geopolitics of sport at the University of Rennes, international federations are “the fruit of globalization and are affected by many political and religious tensions, and they will always line up on the weakest denominator ”.

Behind Monday’s revolution is the risk of “double standards” in the face of another conflict in which human rights are violated, explains the expert.

“The policy of ‘apoliticism’ is to avoid being instrumentalized in conflicts,” he says.

For Jean-Loup Chappelet, a specialist in Olympism at the University of Lausanne, “the pressure was too strong”, given the impact on Western public opinion. The federations, with the IOC at the cusp, “are under much more scrutiny from public opinion than in the past”, with a suspicion born of “decisions such as a World Cup in Qatar”, he explains.

Few could have predicted a breakout of this magnitude just a week ago.

All the more so because Russia has allowed in recent years, like China, “to cover the lack of candidates” to organize major sporting events.

The principle of neutrality often comes to the fore: “We can only fulfill our mission of unifying the world if the Olympic Games transcend all political differences. To achieve this global solidarity and true universality, the IOC and the Olympic Games must be politically neutral,” declared IOC President Thomas Bach in 2020.

Legal obstacles?

After calling the measures “discriminatory,” Russia hinted that it might protest the exclusion decisions.

Behind the scenes, some federations wondered on Tuesday about the legal basis for the IOC’s decision, fearing that they would later be overruled, in case of appeal, by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

“There is the hammer of political pressure and the sickle of legal pressure,” says Pim Vershurren ironically, alluding to the old Soviet symbol.

In the opinion of some, FIFA’s statutes do not allow Russia to be suspended.

According to Loic Tregourès, author of the book ‘Football in Yugoslav Chaos’, when some called for the exclusion of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from the World Cup in 1998 “because of what the Milosevic regime was doing in Kosovo”, FIFA He replied: “until the UN makes a decision in this regard, we do not move.”

When it comes to FIFA, “legal bases can be found” in its statutes on “respect for human rights”, but “however, there is the principle of independence and political neutrality” in the same statutes, explains Tatiana Vassine, a lawyer specializing in sports law.

Two objectives “to reconcile”. Not to mention, she explains, that the national associations of sports federations “are supposed to be independent” in the legal sense. In other words, the Russian football federation is not indebted for the decisions of the Russian president.

The risk of “precedents”

FIFA knows that “every political action it takes against Russia could turn against it later”, explains Pim Vershurren, especially when it defends “neutrality” which has been “credible” so far, because “in the past it has been more cautious”. The decisions made “will set precedents and make history.”

“When it is the West that is attacked in its deepest values, federations such as FIFA or the IOC are under much more pressure than when it is other countries further away,” he adds. “We think of the Middle East, where there are similar situations,” she adds.