Last month, the judgment of the Munich Court of Appeals (Oberlandesgericht) that held the arbitral award of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Claudia Pechstein’s doping case to be unenforceable has attracted a lot of attention internationally. It has been called “ground-breaking”, “earth-shaking” and “revolutionary”. Antoine Duval of the T.M.C. Asser Instituut has done a great job and produced an English translation of the judgment, available at SSRN. I am sure that the translation is of great interest to large parts of the international arbitration community. I also hope that it helps to dispel some misconceptions about the judgment’s percieved hostility to sports arbitration. Here is Antoine’s take on the judgment:
“The future of CAS is in the balance and this ruling should trigger some serious rethinking of the institutional set-up that underpins it. As you will see, the ruling is not destructive, the Court is rather favourable to the function of CAS in the sporting context, but it requires a fundamental institutional reshuffling. It also offers a fruitful legal strategy to challenge CAS awards that could be used in front of any national court of the EU as it is based on reasoning analogically applicable to article 102 TFEU (on abuse of a dominant position), which is valid across the EU’s territory.”
For the German readers amongst you, the full judgment can be found here.