The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejected the appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee, which contested its suspension decided in mid-October by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in connection with the conflict in Ukraine, announced the body based in Lausanne Friday.
To discover
Paris 2024: the map of Olympic sites
The IOC thus intends to sanction the placement under the authority of the Russian body of sports organizations in the regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia, located in eastern Ukraine and occupied by the Russian army, recalls the CAS in a press release.
The court based in Lausanne also indicates that its decision is, at its level,
“final and binding”
but that it can be appealed within 30 days to the Swiss Federal Court.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the CAS considers that the IOC
"did not undermine the principles of legality, equality, predictability and proportionality"
.
Meeting in Bombay on October 12 for its 141st session, the IOC had shaken up its agenda to react to the
“unilateral decision”
taken a week earlier by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) to annex four Ukrainian sports organizations.
According to the Olympic body, this Russian initiative constitutes a
“violation of the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian national Olympic committee”
, and therefore of the Olympic Charter.
The Russian Olympic Committee seized the CAS on November 6.
The now confirmed suspension of the ROC was added to a range of sanctions taken by the IOC at the end of February 2022, just after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army: ban on any international competition on Russian soil as well as to allied Belarus, and all the official symbols of the two countries on the fields and world podiums.
This measure by the IOC also has the effect of depriving the ROC of Olympic funding.
However, it has no consequences for the presence of Russian and Belarusian athletes who did not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, under a neutral banner, at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, authorized at the beginning of December by the IOC.