Caster Semenya Fought This For Six Years. Here Is What She Was Actually Fighting
A Ruling That Took Six Years to Unravel
In April 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, known to almost everyone in the sports world simply as CAS, handed down a decision that would shadow an athlete for the next six years of her life. Caster Semenya, twice an Olympic champion, had challenged a regulation issued by World Athletics that required her to medically lower her natural testosterone levels just to keep competing in her own event. CAS ruled against her. She then took her case to the only court on earth with any power to touch that ruling, the Swiss Federal Tribunal, and lost there too.
It took until 10th July 2025 for the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, an institution most people know simply as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), to say plainly that something had gone wrong with how her case was reviewed. Even then the victory was narrow. The Grand Chamber did not strike down the rule she had originally fought. It only found that Switzerland had failed to examine her challenge with the rigour that a case touching her fundamental rights actually demanded. By the time that judgment landed, Semenya had already lost the better part of a decade of her competitive career waiting for an answer.
Her story is unusual only because it became so visible. Every year CAS produces awards that a losing side is convinced were wrong, unfair, or badly reasoned, and almost none of those athletes or clubs have Semenya’s resources or her platform. Once CAS rules, that ruling is final. There is no internal appeal within the system that produced it.
So what actually happens once the final whistle blows on a CAS case? What legal protection, if any, is still available to the losing side?
Why Losing at CAS Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
CAS was created in 1984 at the urging of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), largely to keep sporting disputes out of a patchwork of national courts and inside one specialised body. It has succeeded almost completely. Nearly every major federation now writes CAS jurisdiction directly into its own rules, so accepting a licence, a transfer, or Olympic accreditation quietly means accepting that CAS will have the final word if a dispute ever arises.
This is where a common assumption trips people up. In most legal systems, losing a case is followed by an appeal to a higher body that looks at the facts and the law again and can reach a different answer. CAS was deliberately built not to work that way, and neither is the machinery sitting above it. There is a real and important difference between saying I want to appeal because I disagree with the outcome, and saying I want a court to check whether this award is even legally capable of taking effect where I live. The first door is closed. The second, in a very narrow form, remains open.
Because CAS is seated in Lausanne, that second door only exists in one place. The Swiss Federal Tribunal, applying Switzerland’s own Private International Law Act, commonly abbreviated as the PILA, is the sole authority with power to annul a CAS award. Not a court in Nigeria. Not a court anywhere a losing party might actually live. Switzerland, on Switzerland’s own terms.
Five Narrow Doors, And How Rarely They Open
Article 190 of the PILA gives a losing party exactly five grounds on which the Swiss Federal Tribunal will even consider setting an award aside, and its case law over the decades shows just how tightly those doors are guarded.
The first is Jurisdiction. Did the tribunal even have authority to decide this dispute at all.
The second is the Right to Be Heard. In Cañas v ATP Tour [CAS 2005/A/95], a case brought by the tennis player Guillermo Cañas, the Swiss Federal Tribunal actually annulled a CAS award because the panel had rejected his arguments without properly explaining why [An Interesting case to read]. Years later, American gymnast Jordan Chiles faced a similar problem when previously unavailable video evidence appeared to contradict CAS’s finding that her coach’s inquiry was submitted four seconds late. CAS declined to reopen the final award, but the Swiss Federal Supreme Court later accepted that the new evidence could justify revision and referred the matter back to CAS. The case illustrates that arbitral finality does not eliminate all judicial safeguards.
The third ground concerns the composition of the arbitral panel. If an arbitrator had an undisclosed conflict of interest, or a challenge to an arbitrator was wrongly handled, that can be a basis for annulment too, though Swiss judges also expect a losing party to have done its own homework rather than waiting passively to be told about a problem.
The fourth and hardest ground of all is Incompatibility with Public Policy. Its most famous test came in Matuzalem, the case of Brazilian footballer Francelino da Silva Matuzalem, who was ordered to pay Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk more than [11] eleven million euros in damages and then threatened with an indefinite worldwide ban from football if he failed to pay. The Swiss Federal Tribunal struck that threat down, holding that it violated Article 27 of the Swiss Civil Code by leaving Matuzalem’s entire economic freedom at the mercy of a debt he had no way of earning the money to pay. It remains one of only a handful of cases in Swiss legal history where an international award was overturned on these grounds. Public policy protects against catastrophe. It does not protect against ordinary error.
The fifth is procedure more generally, and it exists mostly as a reminder that not every irregularity counts. A defect has to be serious enough to have plausibly changed the outcome, not merely present somewhere in the record.
In a nutshell, as explained above, under Article 190(2) of the Swiss PILA, a party may challenge a CAS award only on the following grounds:
a. Improper constitution of the arbitral tribunal;
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b. Wrongful acceptance or rejection of jurisdiction;
c. Decision beyond the parties’ submissions;
d. Violation of the parties’ procedural rights; and
e. Incompatibility with public policy.
Add these five together and what emerges is a system built to catch the truly exceptional case. A losing party convinced that CAS simply reached the wrong conclusion, applied the rules poorly, or weighed the evidence unfairly will typically find that none of these five doors actually opens for them.
Strasbourg Starts Asking Harder Questions
For a long time, Switzerland was effectively the only outside check on CAS. That began to change once the European Court of Human Rights accepted it had a role to play. In Mutu and Pechstein v Switzerland, a joined case decided in 2018 involving footballer Adrian Mutu and speed skater Claudia Pechstein, the ECtHR confirmed that Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair trial, genuinely applies to CAS arbitration even though it is technically voluntary. The court reasoned that an athlete facing a career-ending suspension has no real alternative but to accept CAS jurisdiction, so her consent cannot be treated the same way as a business freely signing a commercial contract.
That principle came to a head in Semenya’s own case. When the Grand Chamber ruled in July 2025, it found that the Swiss Federal Tribunal owed her what it called a particularly rigorous examination, given how compulsory CAS arbitration is and how much was genuinely at stake for her. It found that Switzerland had not met that standard. The regulation she had originally challenged still stands today. But the judgment sends a clear signal to Lausanne that when fundamental rights are involved, a quick and shallow review will no longer be accepted as good enough.
Where Nigeria Actually Stands In All of This
This is where the picture becomes genuinely difficult for a Nigerian club or athlete. Nigerian courts have no power whatsoever to annul a CAS award. That authority belongs to Switzerland alone, simply because that is where CAS is seated. A Nigerian court only enters the picture later, and only if someone actually tries to enforce that award against assets sitting in Nigeria.
At that stage, the relevant law is the Arbitration and Mediation Act 2023, usually referred to as the AMA. Section 57(1) of the AMA says
“An arbitral award shall, irrespective of the country or state which it is made, be recognised as binding, and on application in writing to the Court, be enforced by the court subject to the provision of this section …..”
Section 58 then allows the party against whom enforcement is sought to resist enforcement on a closed list of grounds that closely mirror Article V of the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, the treaty that underpins most cross-border enforcement worldwide. The same grounds are also provided for under Section 58(2) of the AMA.
On paper this sounds like real protection. Looked at closely, it turns out to be something much thinner. Section 58 is not something a losing party can invoke on its own initiative. It only comes alive once someone else chooses to seek enforcement in Nigeria. If the winning party never bothers, because the club has no assets worth chasing there, the whole mechanism simply never switches on. And even a successful objection under section 58 does not cancel the underlying award. It only stops that particular award from being enforced against whatever happens to be sitting in Nigeria right now. The award remains fully valid everywhere else in the world.
This raises a genuinely interesting and, as far as the available case law shows, unresolved question.
Could a Nigerian club that has just lost at CAS go straight to a Nigerian court and ask for a declaration that the award should never be recognised in Nigeria at all, before anyone has even tried to enforce it?
The wording of section 58 does not clearly rule this out. But Nigerian courts have generally been reluctant to entertain declarations about disputes that are still hypothetical rather than immediate, and the whole architecture of the AMA leans toward a principle of minimal court intervention, meaning judges are expected to step in only at the specific points the law designates for them, not wherever a party feels aggrieved. Nobody appears to have tested this question with an actual CAS award, which means a losing Nigerian party is, in practice, often left waiting to be sued before it can even begin to defend itself.
Finding a Balance That Actually Works
None of this is an argument against arbitration itself. If every unhappy athlete could simply relitigate their case before a national court, arbitration would collapse under its own weight within a single season, and international sport would lose the one real advantage a specialised tribunal gives it, which is consistency and genuine expertise in the sport itself.
But a system only earns the right to call its protection meaningful if an ordinary person can actually reach it, not just an Olympic champion with a decade to spare and a legal team funded by international attention. In practice, much of the judicial challenge still takes place in Switzerland, often in a foreign legal language and at a cost that may place the process beyond the practical reach of many Nigerian clubs and athletes. Nigeria’s own courts offer, at best, a narrow and defensive backup that only activates once the fight has already come looking for you.
The final whistle in a CAS hearing room ends the arbitration. It does not end the law. Semenya’s long journey through Lausanne and then Strasbourg proves that some form of judicial protection genuinely exists for a losing party. The real question this article has tried to answer is not whether that protection exists, but whether an ordinary athlete or club without her resources could ever actually reach it in time for it to matter. On the evidence gathered here, the honest answer is not yet, and certainly not easily.
