THE 2017 EGYPTIAN SPORTS LAW: ASSESSING DISPUTE RESOLUTION AMIDST PLURALISTIC GLOBALIZATION

The issuance of the 2017 Egyptian sports law 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 establishment of such nonjudicial sports dispute resolution mechanism affected not only the predictability of the sports disputes as a core element for the investment in the rising sports industry but also the achievement of sports justice as an ultimate goal of settling disputes.
The 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 favoured 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 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 nonjudicial sports arbitration and settlement center, considering the leading model of the CAS, in addition to the existing judicial mechanism of settling sports disputes. The paper eventually argues that those two forums lack the comprehensive capacity to efficiently satisfy the aspirations of sports stakeholders. It concludes with suggesting legislative reforms to fit such forums to the sports fuss.