Arbitration in Lex Sportiva: Guest post by Bedavyasa Mohanty and Jay Sayta

The following is a guest post by Bedavyasa Mohanty and Jay Sayta, both undergraduate students at National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Jay Sayta maintains a website on gambling laws in India.

This post discusses the history, development and future of the Court of Arbitration of Sport as a mechanism of arbitrating on any issue relating to sports. The CAS arbitrates disputes of various sports ranging from physical sports like football and hockey to mind games like chess; and card games like poker. (Though it has been argued that poker is a game of considerable skill, akin to chess).

The Tribunal Arbitral du Sport or the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS), with its headquarters at Lausanne, Switzerland, was established in the year 1984 by the International Olympic Committee with the intent of serving as the ultimate authority to adjudicate on disputes relating to rights of athletes, governing bodies and various sports federations.

Hurdle for International Arbitration Centre, Goa.

The New Year is definitely not a good start for the proposed International Arbitration Centre at Goa, India. Aires Rodrigues, a social activist has asked Law Minister Veerappa Moily not to inaugurate the centre as it is being set up by a private trust and also because there are already international arbitrations happening at Indian Council of Arbitration and Indian Council of Dispute Resolution (ICADR), both being registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860. According to Aires Rodrigues the new private center at Goa will be run by a private trust which will not be accountable to the public. More on this can be found here.

I doubt whether an international arbitration centre for commercial matters necessarily requires a registration under Societies Registration Act. On the other hand, there remains a skepticism (as was discussed in few conferences organized this year): Will so many arbitration institutions mushrooming without any international expertise and without any support of the government or any other international arbitration institute help the business community or only add to confusion and chaos?