Africa-Press – Botswana. The Botswana Athletics Association (BAA) legal advisor, Tirayaone Sedimo is attending a high level sports Law Africa Conference in South Africa.
The conference will discuss amongst others, labour law in sport, procedures before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, sponsorships, partnerships and compliance with governing bodies, the gambling boards in sports and regulations and protocols followed to avoid match fixing.
Sedimo said in an interview that the recent case of World Athletics, Golden Door Sports Agency, BAA and the Botswana National Sport Commission (BNSC), made them realise that BNSC affiliates lacked knowledge in terms of interpretation of contracts and the clauses.
“The recent case that was before court was supposed to go to the arbitration first, but the parties had irrevocably submitted to the same, and it just an issue of lack of understanding of one’s contract,” he said.
Sedimo said most of the international contracts that they signed, either as affiliates, partners or associates with the international bodies, had an arbitration clause and were to be presented before a tribunal outside their jurisdiction as Botswana.
Therefore, he said the conference came at the opportune moment when the BAA needed it the most.
He, however, said at the end of the conference, there would be information and skills transfer by cascading it to the relevant stakeholders in athletics.
He said he would be shedding light to them about issues concerning arbitration in sport and dispute resolution to say if they had irrevocably submitted to issues of arbitration, there was no other rules they need to explore before they exhaust those issues.
“We want people to understand the contracts they are getting into, more so that sport has been fully monitised. People need to know the kind of contacts and agreements they enter into,” he said.
Meanwhile, one of the speakers at the conference is a well-known arbitrator, Prof. Dr Ulrich Haas, who has a vast experience in sports and commercial arbitration.
According to the conference information Prof. Dr. Haas has been an arbitrator with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland since 2004.
He also acted as an arbitrator for the ad hoc Division of the CAS at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
He was a member of the drafting team for the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC) and a member of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission (2014) set up by the Union Cycliste Internationale and the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate the doping culture in the sport of cycling.
In 2018 and 2020, he chaired WADA’s Governance Reform Commission.
For More News And Analysis About Botswana Follow Africa-Press
