Should the IOC Require Host-Nation Anti-Corruption Reforms?

There’s a joke in Olympic law circles: the host-nation organizing committee has 100 lawyers, and 99 of them do IP. The International Olympic Committee cares a lot about protecting its own and its sponsors’ intellectual property; no surprise there. But you may be surprised to hear that the IOC has turned its attention in the last decade or two to a number of issues that generally concern ethics or justice.   In the various legal documents involved in the Olympic Games, you’ll see nods (of varying degrees) to doping, environmental concerns, and even human rights. This is not to say that the IOC places a premium on these issues; far from it. But their importance is at least acknowledged.

Not so with host-nation corruption. It can be said that corruption in international sport has three dimensions. The first is competitive corruption (doping, match-fixing, and the like). The second is corruption within the international governance organization (FIFA, IOC). These two have received enormous attention in the last decade or two, including from the IOC. But there is a third dimension of corruption that the international governance organizations have, to date, largely overlooked: official corruption within the host nation. For more on this, see our ebook.

What if a commitment to adopting meaningful anti-corruption reforms was a criterion for awarding the Games? What if a country could not win the bid without entering into enforceable agreements to reasonably deter its own official corruption? This is not to say that we should only award the Olympic Games to countries that already tend to enforce anti-corruption laws; if we did that, the movement toward awarding bids to developing countries would instantly stall and we’d be hosting the Games in European and North American countries almost every time. But what if a country were required to do what Brazil is now doing, and take appropriate steps to address its own official corruption? This may be an idea whose time has come.