Sports organizations’ duty to protect athletes’ dignity: a universal human rights analysis to comply with the prohibition of non-accidental violence in sports regulations

Modern sports organizations, like the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique and the Fédération Internationale de la Football Association, prohibit different forms of non-accidental violence, including sexual harassment, sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse, and neglect. This prohibition relates to a sports organization’s modern duty to protect human rights and dignity during all activities. In practice, however, it is often difficult to determine when a sports organization member’s acts or conduct crosses the line of intrinsic sporting demands to become harassment, physical or psychological abuse, or neglect towards another member. Sports law literature is scarce on this issue. The authors provide a contemporaneous answer to this question revisiting the meaning of human dignity and its relation to the right of freedom from degrading treatment. The authors offer a test to answer the question ¿when an act or conduct reaches the standard of non-accidental violence in the professional sports context? They also apply their proposed test to real-life scenarios of potential non-accidental violence in sports.

Subjects

Non-accidental violen...

Degrading treatment

Sports

Law

Harassment

Human rights

Human dignity

License

Acceso Abierto.

URL License

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

How to cite

Muñoz, E., Pallares-Yabur, P. & Zatarain, B. Sports organizations’ duty to protect athletes’ dignity: a universal human rights analysis to comply with the prohibition of non-accidental violence in sports regulations. Int Sports Law J 26, 19–42 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40318-025-00303-1

Table of contents

1 Introduction -- 2 Interdependency between the prohibition of non‑accidental violence, human dignity, and the right to freedom from degrading treatment -- 3 Setting the standard to determine violations of the prohibition of non‑accidental violence -- 4 Proposed test for sports rules on non‑accidental violence -- 5 Application to specific conduct in the sports of gymnastics -- 6 Conclusion.