The Pechstein decision of the Munich Court of Appeals (Oberlandesgericht) of January 15, 2015 has made headlines. The Munich court refused to recognize an arbitral award of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), since it held the underlying arbitration agreement between Claudia Pechstein, the speed skater, and her sport’s governing body to be invalid. Just two weeks earlier, another German Court of Appeals also had held a CAS award to be unenforceable. The Bremen Court of Appeals on December 30, 2014 found in favour of SV Wilhelmshaven, a northern German amateur football club, in its dispute with FIFA and the German Football Association, DFB.
For a full discussion of the case, please see my post published today on the Kluwer Arbitration Blog. In this post, I also look at ways in which the German legislator may come to the rescue of sports arbitration, and look at a draft anti-doping bill (Referentenentwurf eines Gesetzes zur Bekämpfung von Doping im Sport) that in its current form contains a provision on the admissibility of sports arbitration.
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