Editor's Note: Daniela
Heerdt is a PhD researcher at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. Her PhD
research deals with the establishment of responsibility and accountability for
adverse human rights impacts of mega-sporting events, with a focus on FIFA
World Cups and Olympic Games. She published a number of articles on mega-sporting
events and human rights, in the
International Sports Law Journal, Tilburg Law
Review, and the Netherlands
Quarterly of Human Rights.
In the past couple of years, the Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) made remarkable steps towards embedding
human rights into their practices and policies. These developments have been
discussed at length and in detail in this
blog and elsewhere, but
a short overview at this point is necessary to set the scene. Arguably, most
changes were sparked by John
Ruggie’s report from 2016, in which he articulated a set of concrete
recommendations for FIFA “on what it means for FIFA to embed respect for human
rights across its global operations”, using the UN Guiding Principles on Business
and Human Rights (UNGPs) as authoritative standard.[i]
As a result, in May 2017, FIFA
published a human rights policy, in which it commits to respecting
human rights in accordance with the UNGPs, identifies its salient human rights
risks, and acknowledges the potential adverse impacts it can have on human
rights in general and human rights of people belonging to specific groups. In
October 2017, it adopted new bidding regulations requiring
bidders to develop a human rights strategy and conduct an independent human
rights risk assessment as part of their bid. In March 2017, FIFA also created
a Human Rights Advisory Board,
which regularly evaluated FIFA’s human rights progress and made recommendations
on how FIFA should address human rights issues linked to its
activities. The mandate of the Advisory Board expired at the end of last
year and the future of this body is unknown at this point.
While some of these steps can be directly
connected to the recommendations in the Ruggie report, other recommendations
have largely been ignored. One example of the latter and focus of this blog
post is the issue of embedding human rights at the level of national football
associations. It outlines recent steps taken by the German football association
“Deutscher Fussball-Bund” (DFB) and the Dutch football association “Koninklijke
Nederlandse Voetbalbond” (KNVB) in relation to human rights, and explores to
what extent these steps can be regarded as proactive moves by those
associations or rather spillover effects from FIFA’s human rights efforts.
The DFB
Since 2017, DFB runs a working group on the
association’s human rights concept. This was triggered by DFB’s application to
host the EURO 2024 and the social programs around the 2018 World Cup. In particular,
the required human rights strategy for the EURO 2024 application led DFB to
adopt a statutory commitment to human rights in 2019. Paragraph 2 of DFB’s
Statutes read as follows:
“The DFB takes responsibility for respecting
all internationally-recognized human rights and promotes the respect for these
rights. It strictly opposes unconstitutional behaviour as well as any form of
discriminatory or inhuman attitudes and behaviours. This applies to every form
of violence, irrespective of it being of physical or mental nature. The DFB
commits in particular to the protection of children and youth from sexual
abuse”.[ii]
The human rights strategy for the 2024
tournament has been developed through engaging a variety
of stakeholders, including the German Human Rights Institute, the German
Olympic Committee and a range of civil society organizations representing the
rights of children or fans amongst others. According to
the DFB and some of these stakeholders, the strategy builds on and
streamlines existing initiatives regarding corporate social responsibility and
youth work. The DFB claims that human rights have been part of the DFB’s
national and international activities for years, although not framed within
recognized human rights standards. Since 2010, its Ethics
Code enshrines values such as respect, diversity, integrity, transparency
and solidarity in football. Moreover, it promotes projects on participation,
integration, fair play, diverse fan cultures, and the prevention of violence
and promotion of equality both at grass-roots and elite level sports. This
certainly provides a good vantage point for DFB’s human rights efforts.
Currently, the DFB is finalizing its human rights policy, and in the meantime,
a number of smaller initiative were taken, such as the organization of hearings
on the issue of political statements of players in 2020.
The KNVB
Last month, the KNVB announced its support
for the adoption of a sport
and human rights covenant, similar to the existing agreements on international
responsible business conduct. In its announcement, it acknowledges the unique
position of sports to promote human rights and highlights the need to use this
power also in the context of international tournaments. According to the KNVB,
such a covenant would advance collaboration with governments in host countries
and help to address issues, promote dialogue and investigation, facilitate the
exchange of knowledge and information, and create a level-playing field.
Moreover, the KNVB claims that it can help to foster sustainable positive
change regarding the human rights situation in host countries and provide
players and associations with a responsible manner to participate in
international tournaments.
KNVB’s call for a covenant has not been
without criticism. Amnesty Netherlands explicitly voiced their concerns
regarding the initiative on twitter,
welcoming the efforts of KNVB to look at the human rights situation in Qatar in
more detail, but opposing the creation of a covenant, for the reason that it
would not provide any remedy to migrant workers in Qatar. The hazardous and
inhuman working conditions on World Cup-related construction sites have been
documented extensively,
including in a recent
study conducted by Amnesty Netherlands. These reports show that despite
legislative changes to Qatar’s labour law, changes on the ground are lacking
and additional human rights issues related to the 2022 World Cup, such as the protection
of LGBTQI fans remain largely unaddressed. While the KNVB published its point of views on a
World Cup in Qatar together with a list of initiatives regarding the
tournament, these points and measures are rather broad and do not explicitly
address existing human rights risks. An exception is an event planned for this
year on human rights and sport events hosted together with the Dutch House of
Representatives.
In addition to KNVB’s recent decision to
adopt a sport and human rights covenant, a number of existing KNVB initiatives
are worth highlighting from a human rights perspective. For instance, the KNVB
was one of the football associations pushing FIFA to integrate human rights
requirements into bidding regulations for international tournaments. Other
examples relate more to the day-to-day business of football, rather than events,
such as KNVB’s efforts on promoting
diversity and countering racism and other forms of discrimination within
the world of Dutch football. While these efforts are clearly linked to human
rights standards, they are not framed in a human rights language, nor
streamlined under a commitment to human rights.
FIFA’s ‘trickle down effect’ or civil society pressure?
On a global scale, the DFB and KNVB might
be the pioneers of national football associations starting concrete efforts to
embed human rights into their policies and practices. Clearly, the DFB is a
couple of steps ahead of the KNVB, but both associations are committed to in
particular addressing human rights issues in host countries of football
tournaments. Furthermore, both draw inspiration from the broader business and
human rights movement and explicitly reference the respective National Action
Plans on business and human rights, which are policy documents adopted by the
governments to implement the UNGPs. However, it becomes clear that through
focusing on human rights risks related to host countries of international
tournaments, the KNVB only reacts to a fraction of the actual human rights
risks involved in the world of football.
Nevertheless, both associations are making
a start and in order to find ways for encouraging other national football
associations to follow suit, it is essential to understand what triggered these
recent initiatives and changes. Arguably, there are two possible explanations.
The first is that FIFA’s human rights efforts begin to have a trickle
down-effect. The need for this has been stressed by Ruggie in his 2016 report.
He recommends FIFA to adopt a human rights policy that applies to its
relationships with its member associations (Recommendation 1.1) and advises
FIFA to use its annual member associations’ conferences to raise awareness on
human rights responsibilities of national football associations (Recommendation
4.5). Moreover, he recommends that “FIFA should ensure that the human rights
commitment in Article 3 of the FIFA Statutes is mirrored in the requirements of
the Standard Statutes for member associations, and is also extended to the
requirements for confederations’ statutes at the earliest opportunity”
(Recommendation 1.3). While FIFA has not yet adapted the Standard Statutes for
member associations, DFB nevertheless decided to mirror FIFA’s statutory human
rights commitment in its own Statutes. In fact, when presenting its human
rights efforts on its website,
the DFB explicitly refers to FIFA’s human rights policy and human
rights-related regulations of UEFA.
The second explanation concerns the
increasing pressure from civil society in both countries, due to the 2022 World
Cup coming closer, but also due to the rise of reports on cases of abuse in the
world of football in the past years. In particular the cases of mental,
physical, and sexual abuse of female football players on the national team of Afghanistan
& Haiti
made international headlines, as well as the recent revelations of cases of sexual
abuse of young football players in clubs in the United Kingdom in the
1970s. While these types of abuses where not explicitly addressed in Ruggie’s report,
it does identify gender discrimination as “endemic human rights challenge” for
the world of association football.[iii]
Pressure on national football associations arguably also increased through national
and regional regulation. Both associations seem to acknowledge the parallels to
the broader business and human rights movement, which currently sees a trend
of mandatory due diligence laws on national and regional levels. The fact
that football is big business, both on a day-to-day basis and when big tournaments
are happening is uncontested. Therefore, there is no doubt that the UNGPs’
corporate responsibility to respect human rights applies to national football
associations and that the UNGPs provide a good starting point and framework for
national football associations to understand and implement their human rights
responsibilities.
Conclusion
Obviously, these two explanations are not
mutually exclusive and FIFA’s human rights journey plays an important role in
the efforts taken by the DFB and the KNVB. Moreover, the importance of Ruggie’s
report in 2016 cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, it seems like some of these
recent human rights efforts by national football associations are rather
reactive than proactive, following FIFA’s lead and the pressure by civil
society on the world of sports more generally. As long as the result would be
the same, it should not matter much. That, however, is questionable when it
comes to sport and human rights. Reacting to specific issues when they arise
can result in a piece-meal approach that might not only be more labour
intensive but more importantly is likely to overlook a range of human rights
risks related to the world of football and sports more generally. Therefore, a comprehensive
approach is key to understanding the human rights risks involved and
identifying ways to address these risks.[iv]
The hope is that DFB’s and KNVB’s efforts
will develop further and eventually ensure that human rights are fully embedded
and respected in the world of (national) football. Very concretely, these
efforts can have great potential for the joint
bid of these two countries together with Belgium for the 2027 Women’s World
Cup, which provides a good opportunity for knowledge exchange between those
associations on their human rights efforts.
[i] John G Ruggie, ‘“For
the Game. For the World.” - FIFA and Human Rights’ (2016) 4
[ii] Translated by the
author. See original source here.
[iii] John G Ruggie, ‘“For
the Game. For the World.” - FIFA and Human Rights’ (2016) 24
[iv] Sally Engle Merry, The
Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex
Trafficking (The University of Chicago Press 2016) 46; Daniela Heerdt
& Nadia Bernaz, Football
and Women’s Rights: the Case for Indicators for FIFA’s Feminist Transformation
(2020) 34, Jean Monnet Working Paper 5/20.