The 2017 Egyptian sports law: Assessing dispute resolution amidst pluralistic globalization

Abstract

The issuance of the 2017 Egyptian sports law where an apparent adoption of the international standards of sports has been followed has significantly affected the Egyptian sports field, especially through establishing a sports arbitration and settlement center to follow the international role model of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the CAS. Not only has the establishment of such nonjudicial sports dispute resolution mechanism affected the predictability of the sports disputes as a core element for the investment in the rising sports industry but also it has jeopardized the achievement of sports justice as an ultimate goal of settling disputes. The Egyptian legislator’s approach of adopting a nonjudicial approach of settling sports disputes can be better understood through examining the new legal pluralism in the field of sports where the international sports legal regime has proven its superiority in the rulemaking powers and the enforcement mechanism through its dispute resolution forums. Such superiority has favored the needs of the sports market over the state’s traditional judicial approaches of settling disputes. Nonetheless, the fact that the administrative judiciary court of the Egyptian Council of State extended its jurisdiction over sports disputes under the same law that created the sports arbitration and settlement center has made the situation more complex, especially after the intense judicial resistance against the center’s jurisdiction which has reached the limits of referring articles of the law and the center’s statute to the Supreme Constitutional Court on claims of unconstitutionality. The paper analyzes the pluralistic globalization of sports and examines the qualitative potentials of the two Egyptian sports dispute resolution forums. It examines the newly established nonjudicial sports arbitration and settlement center, in light of the leading model of the CAS, in addition to the existing judicial mechanism of settling sports. The paper eventually argues that the two Egyptian sports dispute resolution forums relatively lack the comprehensive capacity to efficiently satisfy the aspirations of sports stakeholders after such legal development quest. It concludes with suggesting legislative reforms for the two forums to be adopted by the Egyptian legislator that shall lead to fitting such forums to the fuss.