Abstract des Autors

The recourse to arbitration to settle sports disputes dates back to Antiquity. Evidence can already be found in Ancient Greece, in particular in Homer’s works. However, the arbitrators were invested with the power to determine whether a given athlete had respected the rules of the game during the competition. Therefore, this was not “arbitration” in the legal meaning. Indeed, the arbitrator was situated outside the law, because he was not called upon to apply a legal rule, but a rule of play. However, because the panel called upon to settle these disputes was organised as a real court, ruling after the competitions, their decisions resemble the arbitral awards of our times. There is, however, an important difference between these two kinds of decisions and nowadays, as a principle, there are no courts that have jurisdiction to give a ruling on the application of the rules of play after the game. National courts and arbitration panels can only be competent only for the application of legal rules related to sport. The issue of whether arbitrators should be competent for the application of the rules of play is still topical. If recent case law of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has, at least implicitly, accepted the review of officials’ decisions applying rules of play, Swiss case law is of the opinion that it is not possible to bring a claim in order to assess whether a sports body has correctly applied a rule of play. Verf.-Referat