Politics complicates football: Sympathy for ... Iran

As advertised, last week in Kraków, Poland, I had the great privilege to talk law, development, and the FIFA World Cup, with the group stage under way in Qatar.

Students and faculty of the American Law Scientific Circle (KNPA) and American Law Program at Jagiellonian University (Koło Naukowe Prawa Amerykańskiego TBSP UJ and Szkoła Prawa Amerykańskiego UJ), in collaboration with the Columbus Law School at the Catholic University of America, generously hosted me.  The talk kicked off a KNPA lecture series on "Law and Sustainability." My especial thanks to KNPA President Zuzanna Maszniew and her leadership team.

Photo © Zuzanna Maszniew, used with permission.

I was no John Oliver, to be sure, but I hope I stimulated thinking about the Gordian Knot of sport and politics and its implications for the Middle East and North Africa's place at the table.

Today, November 29, the United States will round out its play in the group stage in Qatar with a match against Iran, simultaneously with a high stakes stand-off between England and Wales. It's a big day, football fans.

Meanwhile, coming home to the States this week, I've been disappointed that Americans are not more in tune with the fascinating stories of geopolitics that are unfolding under the sporting tents of the Qatar World Cup. I admit, what's happening now in China dangles meritorious distraction. But with the USMNT facing Iran today, I want to mention one of the stories from Qatar that has gripped me.

In Iran's opening match with England last week, Iranian footballers refused to sing their own national anthem (BBC).  Stony faced, the players apparently chose to stand in silent solidarity with rights protestors against the government at home (N.Y. Times). Subsequently, Iranian authorities arrested a former national-team footballer known for occasional anti-regime sentiments (Guardian). At Iran's second match, the lads toed the line.

The anthem stunt was extraordinarily courageous. The players had to have known the disgrace they brought on the regime would have consequences when they go home, if not sooner.

Iranian footballers in 2018.
Mahdi Zare/Fars News Agency via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0

More, though, I was struck by the reminder that people and their governments are not the same thing.

I'm a reasonably bright person, as people go, and I've seen a lot of the world. I come from an immigrant family myself. I grew up with a dear Iranian friend. Her stepmother taught me how to make tahchin, and her dad eagerly gave me his own well worn copy of All the Shah's Men. I shouldn't need to be reminded that people are just people, much the same around the world, just trying to make the best of things and find some joy where we can; and that it's wrong to ascribe the Machiavellian motives of states, whether others or our own, to their citizens. The protests now in China say the same.

Yet, I admit, I had followed the USMNT into the World Cup with something of a Cold War mentality, maybe because of the era when I grew up. Yellow ribbons, burning effigies, and "Death to America" chants all bounce around my long-term memory. I was determined that we and our Group B compatriots from England and Wales should beat Iran to make some kind of political point. A Miracle on Ice or Rocky IV situation.

The Iranian men's demonstration unsettled my unconscious prejudice. As a result, a part of me has been pulling for Iran in their last matches, even while, still, I had to favor the England squad, which features some of my beloved Manchester City stars, and Wales, which invokes Lasso-esque Wrexham affections. And even while, of course, I support my home USMNT today, there will be a part of me that wants to see the Iranian side make a pride-worthy showing.

Anti-corruption law violates business-owner privacy, EU court holds with myopic appraisal of transparency

A key European Union transparency law that allows watchdogs to trace corporate ownership to combat corruption has been struck down by the EU high court for compromising personal privacy.

EU beneficial owner registry map from Transparency International, 2021. Read more.
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

I'm not a hard skeptic on the personal privacy prerogative of the EU General Data Protection Regulation. To the contrary, I've written that there's a lot to like about the emerging global privacy norms embodied in the GDPR, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, American social expectations, if not yet federal law, are converging with Europe's.

That said, the EU Court of Justice yesterday announced a profoundly problematic decision at the junction of public access and personal privacy. The blanket disclosure requirements of a key anti-money-laundering law can't stand, the court held, because they don't calibrate the public need for access with the privacy of natural-person business owners with sufficient precision, that is, as a function of necessity and proportionality.

Troublingly, the court characterized transparency norms, which are grounded in treaty and law more firmly in the EU than in the United States, as specially relevant to the public sector and not fully implicated in the private sector, in the context of business regulation.

The potential implication of this proposition is that access to information is limited to a requester learning "what the government is up to," to the exclusion of government oversight of the private sector. That's a cramped and problematic construction of access law that has dogged journalists and NGOs using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for decades. Read more in Martin Halstuk and Charles Davis's classic 2002 treatment. As I have written in my comparative research on access to information, access to and accountability of the private sector is a problem of our times. We must solve it if we're to save ourselves from the maw of corporatocracy.

In my opinion, the CJEU decision fundamentally misunderstands and overstates the legitimate scope of data protection regulation with the effect of enervating transparency as a vital oversight tool. The impact is ironic, considering that data protection regulation came about as a bulwark to protect the public from private power. The court turned that logic on its head by using personal privacy to shield commercial actors from public scrutiny.

Unfortunately (for this purpose), I have my hands full in Europe (coincidentally) right now, and I lack time to write more. Fortunately, Helen Darbishire and the team at Access Info Europe already have written a superb summary. Their lede:

In a ruling that has sent shockwaves through Europe’s anti-corruption and transparency community, the Court found that the Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5, 2018) is too loosely framed and provides for overly-wide public access to the [ownership] registers without a proper justification of the necessity and proportionality of the interference with the rights to privacy and personal data protection of the beneficial owners.

A saving grace, Access Info observed, is that the court did not rule out transparency per se; rather, requesters will have to fight for access case by case on the facts, upon a properly narrowed regulation. In U.S. constitutional terms, it's like saying the one-size-fits-all law was struck for vagueness, but the regulatory objective still can be achieved under a narrower rule that works as applied. All the same, journalists and non-profit watchdogs are not famously well financed to fight for access on a case-by-case basis.

The case is No. C‑37/20 & No. C‑601/20 in the Grand Chamber of the CJEU.

With FIFA World Cup under way in Qatar, law students study sport and soft power, law and development

I'll be talking law, development, and the World Cup today in Kraków, Poland.

Thanks to the American Law Scientific Circle (KNPA) and American Law Program at Jagiellonian University (Koło Naukowe Prawa Amerykańskiego TBSP UJ and Szkoła Prawa Amerykańskiego UJ), in collaboration with the Columbus Law School at the Catholic University of America, for hosting me. This talk kicks off a KNPA lecture series on "Law and Sustainability" and begins at 3 p.m. CET at Pałac Larischa 203, Bracka 12.

I'll share some of the subject matter later.  Too much football to watch!

Qatar World Cup opens Sunday; meanwhile, Netflix series stokes embers of FIFA corruption scandal

I visited CONMEBOL HQ in Asunción, Paraguay, in October.
The South American angle on the FIFA corruption scandal
was engagingly fictionalized in El Presidente in 2020.
(Photo by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

The sport world is abuzz over the Netflix documentary series, FIFA Uncovered, dropped November 9, just weeks before the FIFA World Cup opener in Qatar.

Many in Qatar are crying foul by filmmaker Miles Coleman for dredging up the ugliness of the FIFA corruption scandal, the focus of this docuseries, right now. But in an interview with renowned MENA scholar James Dorsey, Coleman, who created This Is Football for Amazon Prime in 2019, said he had no motive other than historical documentation. The timing of the release, Coleman said, is to bring football fans up to speed on the facts, so they can have informed conversations around the Qatar World Cup.

FIFA was rocked by scandal in 2015 when investigators led by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) arrested top officials in Zurich and issued an avalanche of indictments. It was revealed then that corruption practically poisoned every part of world football governance, especially the bidding process for the world's top sporting event and its 2010 award to Russia for 2018 and Qatar for 2022.

Qatar narrowly edged out a bid from the United States in 2010, and disgraced FIFA President Sepp Blatter and his allies accused the United States of spite. Purportedly relieved of corrupt process, FIFA in 2018 awarded the 2026 World Cup to the joint bid of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

When issues remain controverted, the docuseries presents all voices, Coleman told Dorsey. Indeed, the interviews are what makes the series worthwhile. Most of the story has been told already and well; I read and reviewed a number of books on the subject in the first pandemic summer. The docuseries, though, includes interviews with just about every key player, including Blatter himself, as well as Qatar bid chief H.E. Hassan Al Thawadi; "Qatar whistleblower" Phaedra Al-Majid, featured recently on Norwegian television; and Mary Lynn Blanks, romantic partner of corrupted American football official Chuck Blazer, who died in 2017.

Among the revelations, or at least confirmed suspicions, arising from the docuseries interviews is the fact, borne out by evidence besides his own testimony, that Blatter favored the United States rather than Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup. For all Blatter's failings, he was outmaneuvered by the colossal corruption machine that he helped to create. African Football Confederation President Issa Hayatou, a rival of Blatter's within FIFA, was key to securing the Qatari win. Hayatou was joined in his efforts by Jack Warner, president of the North, Central America and Caribbean Association, whose defection infuriated Blazer.

On Wednesday next week, November 23, at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, I will lead a discussion, "Law, Development, and the World Cup."  The program, in English, begins at 3 p.m. local time at Pałac Larischa 203, Bracka 12.

The World Cup opens Sunday night in Doha, Nov. 20, at 1100 US EST/1600 GMT, when Qatar hosts Ecuador in Group A. The United States MNT plays its Group B opener against Wales on Monday, Nov. 21, at 1400 US EST/1900 GMT. Poland plays its Group C opener against Mexico on Tuesday, Nov. 22, at 1100 US EST/1600 GMT/1700 CET.

Hat tip to Alessandro Balbo Forero, an alum of my Comparative Law class who wrote his final paper on football and Brexit, for alerting me to the drop of FIFA Uncovered. He's an Arsenal supporter, but nobody's perfect.

Here is the trailer for FIFA Uncovered:

And here is the Dorsey interview of Coleman:

In shadow of Ukraine war, webinar tells story of UN Genocide Convention, Polish-Jewish jurist Lemkin

The Jagiellonian Law Society and its President Elizabeth Zechenter, a visiting scholar at Emory, have put together another superb program prompted by the legal implications of the war in Ukraine.

"Lemkin, Genocide, and the Modern World" will run on Zoom in two parts, the first on December 1, 2022, at 12 noon U.S. EST, 1700 GMT, and the second in January, TBA. Free registration is required.

Here is a summary:

You are invited to a webinar on Raphael Lemkin, the UN Genocide Convention, and the likelihood of prosecution of the crime of genocide. Distinguished academics will discuss Lemkin and the Genocide Convention in light of the recent Russian aggression in Ukraine. Lemkin was Polish and Jewish and survived WWII. He had complex, divided loyalties and life experiences that influenced his work. He is often portrayed as a lone ranger, but he was effective in gaining support for his ideas, especially among women groups, who made the convention possible. Lemkin had a complex relationship with Stalin, which influenced his approach to the convention.

The Holocaust Encyclopedia has more on Raphael Lemkin.

Speakers include:

• Professor Donna Lee-Frieze, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, a genocide studies scholar specializing in memory and aftermath; 
• Professor Doug Irvin-Erickson, Carter School Director of the Genocide Prevention Program at George Mason University;
• Professor A. Dirk Moses, Australian historian teaching in political science at the City College of New York, CUNY;
• Professor Roman Kwiecien, Department of International Law at Jagiellonian University, arbitrator at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague) and the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration within the OSCE in Geneva;
• Professor Marcin Marcinko, Jagiellonian University Law School, chair of the National Commission for Dissemination of International Humanitarian Law at the Main Board of the Polish Red Cross, and co-organizer of the Polish School of International Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict.

The Jagiellonian Law Society hopes also to feature contributions from Ukrainian scholars, arrangements pending.

The program is a result of the collaboration of the Jagiellonian Law Society with support from the International Human Rights and Women Interest Committees of the American Bar Association; the New York State Bar, New York City Bar, and New Jersey Bar; the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University.

Again, registration is free.

As Jacoby talk commemorates Kristallnacht, Ukraine recurs in historical record of flights from oppression

An upcoming talk on Kristallnacht, a recent experience in the Paraguayan Chaco, and the ongoing war in Ukraine have me thinking lately about cultural and religious freedom.

In commemoration of Kristallnacht, award-winning Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby will speak at the S. Joseph Solomon Synagogue of the Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Sunday at 7 p.m. The talk will be livestreamed.

Jacoby's father was the sole survivor of his family at Auschwitz. 

"He didn’t hate God for what he had lost and didn’t abandon the Judaism in which he had been reared," Jacoby wrote of his father. "On the contrary, he deepened it with observance, study, and prayer."

Last week I had the privilege of visiting Mennonite communities in the Chaco region of Paraguay. Mennonites arrived in Paraguay in three waves, circa 1875, 1930-32, and 1947. Each time, they sought refuge from regimes that wished to extinguish their religious freedom, if not their lives.

Restored "Koloniehaus" at Filadelfia, Paraguay
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

On a world map at the Fernheim Colony House in Filadelfia, I was struck in particular by one remarkable line tracing Mennonite migration. The journey ran eastward from Ukraine, then Austria-Hungary, to Siberia in 1908; then further east to China, turning south to Indonesia in 1927; then turning back westward across the Indian Ocean and isthmus of Suez, to Europe; and at last on to Paraguay to join the end of the second migration there in 1932.

Besides the astounding odyssey it represented, the line resonated with me both because of the current conflict in Ukraine and because my own grandfather's Jewish family fled what is today western Ukraine at about the same time.

Map at the Filadelfia Mennonite Museum,
similar to the one at the Colony House
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
with no claim to underlying work

As has been widely reported, one Russian strategy in the present war in Ukraine is the forced relocation of Ukrainians, especially children, to Russia, whether to be given passports and politically and culturally Russified, or, in the case of dissenters and combatants, to be condemned and disappeared in remote parts. The strategy is not new.  Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, I wrote about the forced relocation of Polish ethnic minorities, such as the Lemkos, from western Poland to Soviet Russia in 1947.

The parallels are not coincidental.  The Mennonites fled increasingly unstable Austria-Hungary for Russia before the outbreak of World War I. Then, scarcely a decade after the Russian Revolution, rising nationalism rendered even Siberia inhospitable, prompting the exodus of the late 1920s. After World War II, Mennonites remaining in an eastern Germany about to be gifted to the Soviet Union departed in another migratory wave, in 1947. They were not alone; justifiably afeard Christians of other sects departed as well.

Engrossed in the map in Paraguay, I muttered something unkind about Putin. Standing nearby, Fernheim archivist Gundolf Niebuhr said quietly, "History repeats itself."

Niebuhr and I talked about the complex relationship of the contemporary Mennonite Paraguayans with their Latino and indigenous neighbors.  They work closely together, literally, on farms, in schools, and in governance.

But the legacy of repeatedly fleeing oppression, Niebuhr told me, is that even in prosperous and peaceful times, people are dogged by a lurking anxiety over the inevitable impermanence of the idyll. To look around, the Mennonites and their partners have defined the unique cultural identity of the human Chaco. Yet are the Mennonites still only visitors? Will the day come when Asunción says, assimilate, or else? And it will be time to move on again.

Struggle and perseverance are enduring themes in Jewish identity. The former seems inescapable, as expressions of antisemitism abound. Hate simmers now in the Twitter scandals of Kyrie Irving and Kanye West.  Last week, mourners marked the fourth anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. Yet the Jewish tradition teaches that anxiety is counter-productive. God will light the way, as always he has. That seems to have been the remarkable faith walk of Jeff Jacoby's father. Still, there are scarce few among us who do not struggle to eschew fears and doubts.

The Jewish people have a strong claim to unrivaled familiarity with persecution. But assimilation and expulsion of the other seems well ingrained in the human mode of operation, regardless of the nature of the otherness. An elder of my Christian church reminded me yesterday that being Christian is not supposed to be easy. The "Good News" might offer salvation, but leisure and luxury are not part of the methodology, at least not in this life.

I live without fear of being alienated in, or exiled from the only home I know. That is a blessing. All of us possessed of that blessing owe open hearts to anyone who loses it, whether in Pittsburgh, Paraguay, or Ukraine.