LAUSANNE: The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has upheld the appeals filed by the Russian Weightlifting Federation (RWF), Maxim Agapitov, Dmitry Chernogorov and Aleksandr Kishkin (the Appellants) against the four decisions rendered on 23 May 2022 by the Eligibility Determination Panel (EDP) of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) (the Challenged Decisions) by which the RWF was “prohibited from nominating any candidate for election to the Executive Board, any IWF Commission and any IWF Committee for the IWF elections to be held in June 2022” and, as a consequence, the three candidates Agapitov, Chernogorov and Kishkin were declared ineligible for the same elections.
The Challenged Decisions have been set aside.The CAS Panel in charge of the matters found that the IWF EDP did not have jurisdiction to prevent the RWF from nominating candidates for the elections. Indeed, such decision is of a disciplinary nature and, as provided by Article 13 of the IWF Constitution, it was not for the IWF EDP to rule on the suspension of the RWF in the light of Article 13.12 of the IWF Constitution, but only to determine the eligibility of the candidates in accordance with the IWF Constitution.
Therefore, the CAS Panel could only set aside the Challenged Decisions and state that the ground justifying the ineligibility of the three candidates Agapitov, Chernogorov and Kishkin, proposed by the RWF for election, no longer existed.
