A protester holds a placard during a protest against the Tokyo Olympics. A recent survey has indicated that around 60 percent of Japanese people do not want the Games to go ahead[/caption]
Amid growing opposition to the Summer Olympics that will be held in his capital city in July, and amid calls from citizens and doctors to cancel the Games, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga recently suggested the decision was not his.
“The IOC has the authority to decide,” Suga said last month. “And the IOC has already decided to hold the Tokyo Olympics.”
But what if Covid-19 spreads, and leads Japanese authorities to push back against the IOC’s insistence that the Games “will go ahead”? Here is how Henry Bushnell of Yahoo Sports answered those pertinent questions on 19 May:
* Technically, Suga is right. Legally, neither Japan, Tokyo, the Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) nor the Tokyo 2020 organising committee has the power to cancel the Games. A contract they signed back in 2013, when they won the right to host these Olympics, grants that power exclusively to the IOC.
* The so-called host city contract, legal experts say, is extremely “one-sided” or “imbalanced.” It gives the IOC broad leeway to terminate it. On the other hand, “Tokyo does not have any contractual right to terminate its contract with the IOC, even in the exceptional circumstances presented by Covid,” said Leon Farr, a senior associate at Onside Law, a London-based firm specialising in sports.
* Several international sports lawyers noted that Swiss law, which governs the contract, gives parties an out “if the commitment to the contract has become unreasonable for the party in general due to changed circumstances.”
* “The Japanese could argue that Covid makes it virtually impossible to host the Games and that as a result, the contract should be voided,” says Leon Farr.
* But multiple experts said Tokyo would likely lose that “just cause” argument. “The hurdle that case law sets for the existence of just cause is very high,” explained Kai Ludwig, an attorney at the Zurich-based Monteneri Sports Law firm.
* “It must be a very weighty reason and termination must be the only and last resort.” In this case, it wouldn’t be — cancellation would be a subjective and controversial decision based on a risk assessment.
* If the IOC is determined to hold the Games, then, Tokyo’s only way out of the Olympics would be to unilaterally break the contract. Doing so could cost it what Japanese lawyer Yoshihisa Hayakawa calls “a gigantic amount of money.”
* That’s because the host contract also grants the IOC sweeping legal protection, and heaps liability onto Tokyo, the JOC, and the organising committee. It gives the IOC the right to “take legal action against” Tokyo, the JOC and the organising committee. It also forces Tokyo to answer to “any claim by a third party arising from, or in connection with, a breach.”
* In other words, think of all the entities who’ve paid money to be associated with the Olympics — a complex web of broadcasters, sponsors and the like. They’ve all essentially bought a product, the Olympics, that the IOC owns. If the IOC doesn’t deliver the product as promised, hundreds of these “third parties” would want their money back. Per the contract, if Tokyo is in any way responsible for the Games not happening, Tokyo would be responsible for coming up with all that money that the IOC would owe.
* How much money would that be? If the IOC sued, the case would go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, where damages would be calculated. Estimates of the total amount range from hundreds of millions of dollars to tens of billions. Ludwig, the Zurich-based lawyer, said they’d be at least several billion dollars.
* According to Andrew Zimbalist, an economist and Olympics expert, the IOC could theoretically “sue for international TV money plus sponsorship money minus insurance coverage, probably coming to around $ 4 to 5 billion (SL Rs. 793 b to 992 b).”