Is the Fight against Doping in Sport a Legal Minefield like Any Other?

Abstract

In the fight against doping, creating a level playing field across all sports is very challenging from a legal perspective. A harmonized approach presupposes first and foremost a supreme regulatory authority on a global level. This task cannot be attributed to the public sector, because there is no supranational authority of public international law capable of dealing with it. Thus, responsibility has to be assumed by a private law entity. This in turn requires complicated contractual agreements by which duties and responsibilities are transferred from the individual to the national level and from there to the top of the pyramid. In practice, this process is not only difficult and cumbersome, it also leads to an accumulation of power at the top of the sports pyramid that must be contained by organizational checks and balances, such as access to justice and the rule of law, accountability, transparency, and possibilities for the respective stakeholders to partake in the decision-making process. The weighting of all these different aspects is demanding and further complicated by the regulatory reach of the various national lawmakers. Since national laws differ considerably and a harmonized legislative approach is nowhere near in sight, a global approach in the fight against doping must push back national laws and legal concepts as much as possible. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview on all these legal challenges.