Professional athletes and clubs, under the rules that govern international sport, can compete only if they accept the jurisdiction of an arbitral tribunal seated outside their own country. International federations rely on that arrangement to claim immunity from judicial review, and a new scholarly article refers to that claim as sporting sovereignty. The work, a hypothesis and theory paper published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, examines how far the American Convention on Human Rights constrains the rule-making authority of transnational sports organisations in states parties to the treaty.
The article, authored by researchers affiliated with the Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas in Mexico and the Technological University of Peru, argues that the autonomy of sports bodies is a delegated and conditioned authority rather than an absolute one. Its central legal instrument is conventionality control: the duty of every domestic authority to test the rules it applies against the treaty, of its own motion, wherever the federation is seated.
According to the paper, European courts have already narrowed the claim of sporting sovereignty by holding that compulsory sports arbitration must satisfy fair-trial guarantees. However, the authors note that protection in the European context still depends on the courts of the state where the federation is seated and on a narrow reading of public policy, so the substance of a discrimination complaint may go unexamined.
It proceeds by doctrinal legal analysis and by comparing the European and Inter-American standards of review, and it examines four jurisdictions: Peru, Colombia, Chile and Brazil.
A key doctrinal point of the article is that Inter-American judicial guarantees attach to the function a body exercises rather than to its formal character. They reach private power through the state’s duty to ensure rights, and every domestic authority must apply them of its own motion, regardless of where the federation is seated. This functional approach is presented as the distinguishing feature of the Inter-American standard when set against the European one.
The comparison across the four jurisdictions yields a differentiated picture. Brazil and Chile channel contractual and employment disputes between player and club to the state courts, and Colombia protects players through the constitutional action of tutela, so that closure within the federated system is confined to disciplinary, eligibility and competition matters. Peru is described as the exception, having legislated the primacy of federation rules without such limits.
The article also addresses the argument that speed justifies exemption from judicial review. In the Peruvian and Colombian cases examined, the delays that harmed a club and a player came from federation bodies overrunning their own deadlines. The authors present this finding as undermining the claim that speed requires exemption from review, since the harm arose within the arbitral and federated system itself rather than from external courts.
On the basis of this analysis, the article proposes a criterion of conditioned autonomy. Under this criterion, the power of federations is legitimate where it pursues a permissible aim, observes procedural guarantees, decides while a decision can still serve the person affected, and respects the substantive limit of human dignity and non-discrimination. The authors frame this as a standard for assessing when the rule-making authority of transnational sports organisations remains compatible with the American Convention in states parties.
As a doctrinal and comparative legal study, the article does not report empirical findings beyond the cases it examines, and its conclusions are presented as the authors’ legal analysis. Its stated aim is to show that sporting sovereignty is conditioned rather than immune, and that conventionality control offers domestic authorities in the Americas a route to apply judicial guarantees to sports arbitration of their own motion.
Subject of Research: How the American Convention on Human Rights limits the rule-making authority of transnational sports organisations in Latin America
Article Title: Autonomy without immunity: conventionality control and the limits of sporting sovereignty in the Inter-American system
Article References: Cruz-Núñez, R. L., Aguilar-Brito, H. A., Aguirre-Lanegra, A. J., & Seminario-Hurtado, N. (2026). Autonomy without immunity: conventionality control and the limits of sporting sovereignty in the Inter-American system. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1949642. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1949642
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1949642
Keywords: sports arbitration, sporting sovereignty, American Convention on Human Rights, conventionality control, due process, lex sportiva, sport governance, Latin America, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Chile
News Source: Ophelia Keating. (October 28, 2026). Sporting sovereignty meets human rights: study probes limits of sports arbitration in the Americas. Scienmag.
