The IOC announced on Tuesday that, as part of its Agenda 2020 recommendations, all organisations belonging to the Olympic Movement should “accept and comply with the Basic Universal Principles of Good Governance of the Olympic and Sports Movement.”
At the IRB World Rugby Confex in London on Tuesday, HOST CITY asked IOC vice president Sir Craig Reedie about the feasibility of such a wide-reaching project.
“The reason why the IOC tries to impose on every stakeholder in the Olympic movement the Principles of Good Governance is that sport has a constant demand to be autonomous. It wants to be left alone to run its own rules, and the only way that it will ever be able to maintain the request for autonomy is to have good governance,” Reedie explained.
“International Federations are effectively independent contractors, and nobody is suggesting for a minute that you would make that a condition of being a sport in the programme of the Games, but as a matter of relatively easy conviction it is not difficult to persuade an International Federation that they should have the same principles as the IOC has. We would anticipate and hope that International Federations would follow that.”
Agenda 2020 recommends that organisations should be responsible for self-evaluation and sending information through to the IOC.
Asked by HOST CITY if this might create prohibitive administrative costs, Susan Ahern, head of legal and legislative affairs at World Rugby said, “Not expensive if you are used to running your organisation in a fair, balanced and transparent way.
“The IRB may be an International Federation but we have a corporate structure that supports that – you are bound by company law, audits and so on. We have all those elements in place that any corporate would.”
Agenda 2020 recommends that the Principles of Good Governance should be “updated periodically, emphasising the necessity for transparency, integrity and opposition to any form of corruption.”
Ahern said “Certainly it’s an area where you want to continually strive to be as good as you can be, and it’s an area that’s being looked at by the IRB on a constant basis.”
