Earlier this week, a group of five organisations including Just Peace Advocates that had filed a complaint before the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court against Gianni Infantino and Aleksander Čeferin for assisting in war crimes and crimes against humanity, wrote to members of the UEFA Executive Committee and the FIFA Council, demanding they expel Israel from international football competitions.
Letter to the UEFA Executive Committee
In the letter, UEFA Executive Committee members were reminded that, 6 months prior, they had made an internal decision to cancel plans for an extraordinary meeting intended to suspend Israel’s clubs and national teams from all UEFA-organised events, allegedly to enable Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza to take effect. The five organisations said this suggested “a demonstrably false link between the realisation of the two entirely separate issues.” They also recalled a phone call made by Netanyahu – a fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Court – to Mr Čeferin that played a role in the cancellation of the plans.
The five organisations presented the evidence to the UEFA Executive Committee demonstrating that Trump’s “Peace Plan” is not just entirely ineffective, but widely regarded as a guise for the Trump family Riviera Project and an Israeli state ethnic cleansing project. Importantly, UN human rights experts have determined that the genocide in Gaza continues.
As such, Trump’s “Peace Plan” cannot serve as a valid reason to keep Israel a part of European football. The UEFA’s leadership were called upon to rebuild the credibility of UEFA and their own legacy as sport administrators by immediately expelling Israel:
It is a critical time to apply territorial integrity and human rights provisions in [UEFA] Statutes. If the Israel FA is not suspended for multiple breaches of UEFA Statutes at this point in history, the provisions themselves become futile and unenforceable against any other party in the future.
Letter to the FIFA Council
A separate letter addressed to the FIFA Council highlighted the integration in FIFA structures of the Israeli illegal settlement clubs located on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, which is in clear breach of both the territorial integrity and human rights provisions of the FIFA Statutes. The groups accuse FIFA of having used “systematic institutional delays” since 2013 to avoid enforcing these rules, a strategy they characterize as a denial of justice. They further warned that this failure to act moves the issue beyond sports arbitration and into the sphere of Swiss public policy and due process considerations that could eventually elevate the dispute to the jurisdiction of the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
The FIFA Council was warned by human rights organisations and UN experts that their institutional support and inclusion of illegal settlement clubs is inseparable from serious human rights abuses. Mr Infantino himself acknowledged at the 2024 FIFA Congress that the matter was “urgent” and has insisted since 2017 that the FIFA Council, as opposed to Congress, has competence to decide on it.
The letter to the FIFA Council concluded that
FIFA’s governance standards have reached an unprecedented low, characterized by a complete loss of moral authority and legitimacy. This is the first time since the creation of the UN that an FA from a country implementing genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, while invading several independent states, has been a member of FIFA. Football clubs and players from Israel publicly support the Israeli government actions, while the IFA’s Chairman visits and publicly supports an AirForce that has bombed and killed over 21,000 Palestinian children. Therefore, retaining the [Israel] FA as a FIFA member is not a politically neutral act – it is complicity and it enables sportswashing of the gravest war crimes.
Upcoming decision
In October 2024, the FIFA Council passed the issue of illegal settlement clubs onto the FIFA Governance Audit and Compliance Committee. After 18 months of silence, this Committee is now expected to deny its jurisdiction over the matter and continue Mr Infantino’s policy of arbitrary delays, denial of justice, and grave breaches of human rights of Palestinian people.
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