Semenya case: IAAF slammed
Federation releases list of expert witnesses
CASTER Semenya’s legal team have hit out against the International Association of Athletics Federations for releasing its list of expert witnesses ahead of their battle with the International Athletics Federation before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Semenya’s law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, castigated the IAAF for disclosing the names of its experts before the arbitration proceedings this week.
Norton Rose Fulbright said: “The arbitration proceedings are subject to strict confidentiality provisions, and this information should not have been released. Ms Semenya believes the IAAF press release is a clear breach of the confidentiality provisions that were orchestrated in an effort to influence public opinion in circumstances where the IAAF knew Ms Semenya would not be prepared to respond because she was complying with her confidentiality obligations.”
The CAS has granted Semenya’s legal team permission to publicly release information responding to the IAAF release as a matter of fairness.
Norton Rose Fulbright said that today it would disclose its list of experts who would testify in Semenya’s case.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that Semenya had arrived
The arbitration proceedings are subject to strict confidentiality provisions
Norton Rose Fulbright
in Lausanne before the CAS hearings, scheduled for five days.
Yesterday, the IAAF defended its female eligibility regulations that will require women with naturally elevated levels of testosterone to lower them to below 5 nanomoles for at least six months. This will be limited to athletes who participate in events ranging from the 400m to the mile.
The IAAF said in a statement: “The female category in sport is a protected category. For it to serve its purposes, which include providing females opportunities equal to males, it must have eligibility standards that ensure that athletes who identify as female, but have testes and testosterone levels in the male range, at least drop their testosterone levels into the female range in order to compete at the elite level in the female classification.”
The IAAF announced that it would call on five experts in the fields of obstetrics and gynaecology, pharmacology, andrology and law to defend its stance.
Meanwhile Athletics SA (ASA) said it believed the IAAF’s actions amounted to “underhand tactics to try to win support for their views in the court of public opinion”.
It said in a statement: “ASA will in due course be making a more comprehensive disclosure of its experts’ views on the issues at hand to enable the public to be made aware of our various role players in this case and their fields of expertise who will counter the expert evidence to be tendered by the IAAF.”
The South African government has added its voice in condemnation of IAAF regulations, “mainly as a matter of principle as a country that respects and promotes human rights, and also in support of an application lodged by the ASA at CAS challenging these regulations because they appear to be targeting Caster Semenya.
“Through our department of Sport and Recreation we have established a high-level panel consisting of the medical and legal work-streams respectively. This panel consists of experts in both medical and legal fraternities who constitute the respective work streams. There is a third work stream constituted by the departmental personnel, and its mandate is to raise public awareness and mobilise public support on the discriminatory nature of these regulations.”