A global tournament decides an athlete’s future, a stadium rises on expropriated land, an international arbitrator imposes terms on a worker without any national court able to contest it. Sarah Joseph, a legal scholar specializing in international human rights law, takes these situations seriously and makes them the subject of a book published on October 28, 2026 by Oxford University Press. Her thesis is uncomfortable: sports organizations exercise functions of collective interest, but their subjection to obligations applicable to public actors or Union law remains partial and contested. Associational autonomy, a legitimate principle at its origin, has gradually transformed into a legal shield.

The Essentials

  • Private sports organizations exercise significant influence over labor markets and events of collective interest; the due diligence obligations incumbent on them remain less demanding than those of states.
  • The work analyzes human rights in elite sport, mega-events, athlete rights, remedies, and the application of UN Guiding Principles.
  • In Europe, case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union has partially regulated certain transfers and residence clauses; access to national courts varies depending on applicable law and subject matter.
  • Joseph shows that international human rights standards, particularly the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, theoretically apply to sport but lack binding enforcement mechanisms.
  • Governance reform involves preserving legitimate sporting autonomy while making organizations accountable for the fundamental rights they affect.

Who is Sarah Joseph and why this book now

Sarah Joseph directs the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University in Australia. Her earlier work focuses on the accountability of non-state actors in international law and the limitations of complaint mechanisms before UN bodies. This book extends a decade-long reflection on how international human rights law reaches, or fails to reach, private organizations wielding structural power over individuals.

After Qatar 2022, public debate joined a question lawyers had been asking for much longer: can major sports federations organize themselves as private entities when they exercise significant influence over labor markets, mobilize public resources, and reconfigure entire urban spaces? Joseph approaches this question from the perspective of positive law and its shortcomings, without catastrophism or activist posturing.

The Thesis: A Structural Blind Spot in Sports Governance

The heart of the book rests on a precise observation. Sports organizations—whether international federations like FIFA or the International Olympic Committee, or national leagues—exercise functions resembling those of an employer, a regulator, and sometimes a public works contractor. Yet many sports organizations are private entities, but they are not all uniformly treated legally as mere private associations. This autonomy results primarily from state acquiescence, transnational rules, and contractual and arbitral mechanisms that states long refrained from challenging.

This autonomy has a history and a justification: to ensure governments do not manipulate sporting competitions for political reasons. The International Olympic Committee long brandished this principle to keep governmental interference at a distance, sometimes legitimately. Joseph does not deny this heritage. She shows that the same principle serves something else today: limiting recourse to national courts through arbitral clauses, opposing private arbitration by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to certain external challenges, and subtracting a portion of federation decisions from ordinary democratic oversight.

Joseph’s central argument is that this asymmetry has become structural. Sports organizations benefit from associational autonomy whose requirements for transparency, justiciability, and due diligence remain unequal depending on the organization and applicable legal framework.

Athletes as Workers Under Atypical Contracts

The first category analyzed by Joseph concerns athletes. Their legal situation is singular: subject to highly constraining internal regulations, often bound by mandatory arbitration clauses, exposed to disciplinary sanctions; procedural guarantees depend on the applicable procedure and regulation. Yet they are rarely recognized as employees under common law.

In Europe, case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union has provided partial corrections. The 1995 Bosman ruling liberated the transfer of footballers within European space. More recent decisions have challenged certain residence clauses imposed by national federations. But these advances remain sectoral: they concern primarily professional male football and operate chiefly through competition law and freedoms of movement, including worker mobility. An athlete in a minor discipline, a sportswoman in a country without favorable case law, remains largely defenseless against a federation decision.

Joseph notes that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted in 2011, formally apply to sports organizations. These principles provide that enterprises should exercise due diligence on human rights, particularly identifying and assessing impacts, and establishing or participating in effective grievance mechanisms. Complaint mechanisms exist that certain federations have put in place; their full compliance with the Guiding Principles must be evaluated mechanism by mechanism. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, based in Lausanne, handles several hundred cases per year, but its access is conditional, its procedures lack transparency, and its decisions are rarely motivated in human rights terms.

Workers and Populations at Major Events

The second part of the book is perhaps the most thoroughly documented and hardest to dispute. Major sporting events mobilize tens of thousands of workers in construction, logistics, security, and hospitality. Joseph analyzes the conditions under which these workers operate, drawing on well-documented situations: Qatar 2022 first, where deaths were reported on construction sites linked to Qatar 2022 according to several organizations, but also the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games and various Cricket World Cups organized in countries with weak social protection.

The analytical distinction Joseph makes is useful: sports organizations are not the direct employers of these workers. They contract with host states, which contract with enterprises, which subcontract. This chain of contractual delegation can distance the organization from the direct employment link, but it does not necessarily prevent the imposition of contractual standards or monitoring of working conditions. Joseph shows that this stance is legally tenable today, but morally and politically untenable insofar as federations choose host countries, set construction schedules, and international organizers control major commercial rights, even if revenue distribution varies by event and includes redistribution to organizers and the sports movement.

The third group is local populations: residents expelled to build stadiums, neighborhoods restructured without consultation, communities exposed to lasting nuisance after games end. Joseph analyzes several European examples, notably displacements related to the 2004 Athens and 2012 London Olympic Games, to show that consultation procedures vary from one host country to another and some awarding organizations impose minimal requirements relating to human rights and host evaluation, even if their content and force vary.

The Partial Role of European Law

The comparative chapter on Europe is among the most precise in the book. Joseph distinguishes several registers of intervention. European competition law has produced the most tangible advances for athletes, because it has binding mechanisms and supranational jurisdiction. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights apply instead to member states, not directly to private federations. A federation exercising a delegated public function may engage, depending on circumstances, state responsibility or be subject to applicable national rules, but neither the Charter nor the Convention automatically becomes directly applicable to it in this manner alone.

Legislation on due diligence obligations, currently being adopted in several member states and gradually harmonized at European level through the directive on corporate due diligence on sustainability, could change things. Joseph analyzes this avenue with caution: if sports federations fall within the scope of this directive, they will be required to map their risks and open complaint mechanisms. But the application thresholds, implementation timelines, and sectoral exemptions leave wide margin for uncertainty.

This question of the evolving legal framework connects to issues other sectors know well. Algorithmic surveillance at work poses a structurally similar question: private actors exercise de facto power over workers without ordinary labor law fully applying. Sport is not an isolated case but a particularly visible teaching case.

Joseph also notes that the European sports model, founded on national federations affiliated with continental and international federations, creates a complex architecture where responsibilities are distributed across multiple levels. A national federation can argue it applies international federation regulations, which in turn refers to host states. This mutual referral mechanism is identifiable in other contexts of private governance and corresponds to a blind spot that work on subcontracting chains has well documented.

The Book’s Blind Spots

Joseph is a legal scholar, and this work is fundamentally a book of law. The analysis of positive law mechanisms is rigorous and well sourced. The economic dimensions of sports governance remain in the background.

The reasons why states accept negotiating under such unfavorable conditions with major federations are not examined. Power dynamics linked to television rights, sponsorships, and gate receipts, which enable federations to impose their terms on governments, would have merited deeper treatment.

These questions, falling within the political economy of sport, are touched upon but not addressed.

The focus remains decidedly on international and European law. Extra-European situations are mentioned as examples but not analyzed in their local context. A reader interested in responses from the Global South to these issues, particularly countries that regularly host major events without having the same legal capacity as European democracies, will not find thorough treatment here.

Joseph also remains relatively discreet about positive initiatives underway. Some federations have begun adopting human rights policies, sometimes under pressure from institutional investors attentive to governance criteria. Analysis of these attempts, even if imperfect, would have better situated real margins for progress rather than primarily mapping shortcomings.

Value of the Work

This book first addresses lawyers, sports federation officials, and public decision-makers involved in awarding or organizing major events. It offers them a clear mapping of current legal blind spots and directions in which reforms would be possible.

It also interests a broader reader, attentive to contemporary forms of private governance. Sport is a teaching case: it makes visible, on a massive and mediatized scale, what other sectors practice less spectacularly. A private actor who sets the rules, controls sanctions, imposes arbitration, and captures benefits from an activity of collective interest without being subject to obligations that normally accompany this type of power: this is a configuration encountered well beyond sport. The European directive on due diligence obligations, with implementation scheduled for July 26, 2029 for all concerned enterprises, is probably the most promising vector for filling some of these gaps. Joseph shows with precision why this vector alone will not be sufficient, and what other governance reforms would merit being pursued in parallel.

The central issue of the book is at once political and legal: whether sports federations should be subject to accountability obligations comparable to those imposed on public actors.

Bibliographic Information

Title: Human Rights and Sport: Contested Fields of Justice Author: Sarah Joseph Publisher: Oxford University Press Publication Date: October 28, 2026

Sources

  1. Oxford University Press, book page: https://academic.oup.com/book/63557
  2. Play the Game, The Real European Sport Model: https://www.playthegame.org/publications/real-european-sport-model/