The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act was passed by U.S. Senate

Zero tolerance on anti-doping

On this week the U.S. Senate passed the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act of 2019 (Rodchenkov Act). The aim of the law is to protect the athletes in the fighting against the doping in sport. Pursuant to the Introduction of Rodchenkov Act, the main purpose is ,,to impose criminal sanctions on certain persons involved in international doping fraud conspiracies, to provide restitution for victims of such conspiracies, and to require sharing of information with the United States Anti-Doping Agency to assist its fight against doping, and for other purposes.” The majority of the proposed measures got positive feedbacks, however the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) expressed its concern, as it was described on its website.

The main concern of the WADA is the issue of extra-territoriality in the Act. It means that the Rodchenkov Act would introduce own single rules in relation with its scope, jurisdiction, athletes and also the sports and anti-doping organizations. This rules would be in contrary to the international principles of the sport regulation which are subject to the WADA. According to the WADA overlapping of the law is not the efficient way to regulate this area. The Act also applies multiply jurisdictions that also compromise WADA’s and other ADO’s investigation capacity. This rules impedes the use of the whistleblowers during the investigation because of the aforementioned multiply jurisdiction.

According to the WADA experts, further concern is that the Rodchenkov Act unilaterally exerting U.S. criminal jurisdiction over all global doping activity, the Act will undermine clean sport by jeopardizing critical partnerships and cooperation between nations. The Act is unilateral which emerges discrimination between the athletes by applying particular provisions on them which are similar to the U.S. jurisdiction. This provisions are in relation with the course of the investigation which are adverse with the provisions of the Code. The WADA indicated that the cooperation is important with the U.S. and the organization will also work on it in the future.

The whole article was published on the website of WADA. Please visit the website of WADA for more information. The articles and the particular acts about this topic are only available in English in the chart. The chart is at the bottom of the article.