The Court of Arbitration for Sport and EU Law

Abstract

At the time when the Bosnian case was decided, nearly twenty years ago, few could have predicted that one of its main institutional legacies would be the transformation of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne into a true ‘Supreme Court of World Sport’. In fact, the use of arbitration has proven to be a very successful legal strategy to curb access to national courts and to curtail the reach of EU law in the sporting world. Nevertheless, the legal relationship between EU law and the CAS remains largely uncharted. However, resort to the CAS for many of today's biggest sporting disputes raises numerous questions regarding both its handling of EU law and its status under EU law. These questions will be addressed here, with the purpose of providing a preliminary roadmap to critically grasp the interaction between the CAS and EU law. The first part of this article will introduce the general traits of the interaction between EU law and arbitration (Section 2). In the second part, I will tackle the way the CAS has been dealing with EU law in its proceedings (Section 3). Finally, in a third part, I will consider how CAS awards can be challenged on the basis of EU law (Section 4). I will conclude by calling for the imposition of what I coined a ‘Solange’ formula on the CAS.