Collaborative framework
The challenges
The challenges in addressing crime and corruption in sport stem from a complex mix of structural, legal, and jurisdictional issues:
- Sport lacks the tools and authority to tackle (trans)national criminal issues
- Existing international and national laws and sports regulations are not harmonised, leading to a patchwork of different rules and jurisdictions across the full range of integrity topics
- The entities and initiatives addressing breaches of integrity in sport largely operate independently and focus on a single type of violation, such as corruption, financial crime, competition manipulation, doping, or human rights abuses
ClearingSport’s assessment
These challenges continue in part because actors are not united by universal minimum standards that comprehensively address crime, corruption, and other breaches of integrity in sport.
Several efforts offer good practice examples of addressing these challenges, and the intergovernmental initiatives and collaborative forums that exist are good starting points. But individually, they are unlikely to succeed in enforcing the existing international laws, national laws, and sports regulations they have produced, let alone unify these efforts towards a set of universal minimum standards.
Limited coordination across specialist entities – who perform important work across issues like financial crime, competition manipulation, doping, and human rights abuses – makes it difficult to address the common underlying causes of integrity breaches.
So far, there is no entity leading the charge to unify this patchwork of standards and initiatives by creating comprehensive minimum standards in collaboration with key stakeholders. A collaborative framework could also enable information sharing, which is paramount to achieving the desired goals.
In September 2022, member of the European Parliament, Viola von Cramon, presented a report proposing a ’World Anti-Corruption Agency’ in sport. Photo: Thomas Søndergaard/Play the Game
Photos: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images, Council of Europe, Daniel Jayo/Stringer/Getty Images, UNODC
The identified solution
Create a collaborative framework to harmonise existing policies into universal, minimum standards of integrity in sport.
Based on the assessment of the defined challenges, an identified solution is a collaborative framework. A collaborative framework would:
- unite stakeholders in setting minimum universal standards to apply, at a minimum, across existing frameworks, initiatives, and mechanisms
- provide seamless access to existing frameworks, initiatives, and mechanisms not yet applied to sport and ensure they are fit for purpose in the sporting context
- establish and support existing capacity building via the transfer of knowledge and resources
- disseminate good practice and thought leadership in establishing internal procedures, practices, and bodies
- put mechanisms in place for the sharing of information
Towards an entity
To harmonise existing policies into universal minimum standards of integrity in sport, an international entity could coordinate existing networks to define and administer a collaborative framework.
To ensure effective coordination and oversight, the entity is proposed to be an umbrella organisation connecting the following initiatives, among others:
- National integrity bodies (NIBs), which are established by the national governments, National Olympic Committees (NOC), or multi-stakeholder groups to address integrity issues
- International sports integrity units across Olympic and non-Olympic international sports federations that 1) address multiple integrity issues, and 2) have operational independence from the governing body and thus exhibit separation of powers and oversight.
The mandate of the umbrella entity can be defined by a charter or a convention led by public authorities. This overarching charter or convention would be able to tie together existing frameworks, initiatives and mechanisms, make them fit for purpose in the context of sport and underpin them with good governance standards to ensure their effectiveness.
