Fourth report by the FIFA Human Rights Advisory Board
January 2020
FIFA has shown that it is possible for a global sporting body to make meaningful progress on meeting its human rights responsibilities...
It is our view that FIFA’s human rights efforts have now come to an important cross-roads that require FIFA to deepen its efforts to embed its human rights commitments into the governance of global football or risk losing the ground that has been gained.
[W]e are concerned by the continuing lack of clarity about how accountability for human rights will be ensured with regard to political and strategic decision-making within the organization. That requires an entity at the political or governance level... We do not believe that there currently is such an entity...
As we explain in Part 3 below, in this report we therefore make one single recommendation to FIFA’s leadership: to develop a roadmap for further embedding FIFA’s human rights commitments into decision-making at all levels of the organization with a focus on the political and governance levels, including a mechanism to hold FIFA bodies (as defined in Art 24 of the FIFA Statutes) accountable for progress against that roadmap.
This report is divided into three parts...:
1. Priority cases: ...
2. Tournaments: ...
3. Thematic issues: Broader topics..., including embedding human rights into FIFA’s governance and players’ rights...