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Moroccan Lawyers’ Club Rebuts FSF Press Conference, Deemed Excessive and Unfounded
End of “Sporting Thuggery” on African Pitches: A Jurisprudential Breakthrough the FSF Attempts to Obscure
The Moroccan Lawyers’ Club said it followed with “astonishment tinged with bitterness” the press conference held this morning by the President of the Senegalese Football Federation (FSF), accompanied by his legal counsel. “It is clear that law was the great absentee from this media intervention.”
Faced with what it described as “discursive drift,” the Lawyers’ Club sought to “restore the rigor of the facts” through the following points:
- “The President of the Senegalese Federation, true to his verbal missteps, used medieval language as well as a bellicose and defamatory lexicon, going so far as to describe an appeal before the Court of Arbitration for Sport as a ‘moral and legal crusade.’” The statement added that “this medieval vocabulary, coupled with accusations of ‘administrative hijacking,’ betrays a clear nervousness. One does not argue a technical case using the language of war.” It further noted that describing “as ‘crude’ a decision resulting from a fully adversarial procedure, in which each party was able to express itself, reflects at best emotion, at worst bad faith.”
- “Whether it pleases the FSF and its counsel or not, law is not a fixed matter. The decision of the Appeals Jury does not emerge from nowhere; it constitutes a salutary jurisprudential creation filling a textual gap concerning abandonment of the field.” According to the statement, “in line with the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s case law, this decision will set a precedent: it marks the end of the era of ‘Baltaja’ (sporting thuggery) on African pitches. From now on, blackmail through withdrawal will no longer override sporting ethics.”
- “The President of the FSF ventured onto dangerous ground by describing the detention of 18 supporters as ‘political blackmail.’” The Club stressed that “no one is above the law, especially when the acts of vandalism and assaults in question are established by irrefutable video evidence.” It added that “to claim otherwise is an affront to the judicial sovereignty of the Kingdom of Morocco. Moroccan justice, independent, deals with common law offenses with the rigor of the law, far from any football considerations.” It further stated that “in this regard, the President of the FSF is hardly in a position to lecture others on ethics, given recent developments concerning corruption in his own environment.”
- “The panel of counsel strayed into a semantic register that is, to say the least, baroque, invoking the ‘Île de Ré’ or slavery to contest a sporting dispute.” According to the statement, “these historical references, devoid of any connection to the matter at hand, serve only to mask a total absence of technical arguments. This intellectual shipwreck illustrates the inability of FSF counsel to base their challenge on serious legal grounds.
- “Finally, it should be recalled that Morocco, when its claims were rejected at first instance, exercised its rights of appeal with dignity, without ever yielding to the temptation of judicial populism.” The statement added that “the claim that Morocco would be a ‘champion without a championship’ borders on the ridiculous, while constituting an implicit admission: it effectively recognizes that Morocco is indeed the African champion and that it has prevailed, on all fronts, in this legal and institutional battle.”
The Moroccan Lawyers’ Club stated that it “reserves the right to act through all legal means to protect the image of the Moroccan judicial and sporting bodies in the face of these unprecedented attacks.”
Editorial team/le7tv (Press Release)
