We have published an article in the journal of the Spanish and Ibero-American Arbitration Club (Iurgium)

The action for review (recours en révision / Revisionsklage) in Swiss law, as in many other legal systems that provide for it, is an extraordinary procedural mechanism that allows, in exceptional circumstances, judicial or arbitral proceedings that have been concluded by final decisions to be reopened for substantive review. The article first systematically examines the regulatory and jurisprudential foundations governing such action, both in the context of civil proceedings and domestic arbitration and in the context of international arbitration, in accordance with the Swiss Code of Civil Procedure (CPC) and the Federal Act on Private International Law (PILA), respectively. In particular, it analyses the circumstances that enable such an action to be brought –discovery of subsequent decisive facts or evidence, criminal influence on the decision or supervening defects affecting the impartiality of the tribunal– as well as the requirements for admissibility, limitation periods and legal effects. It then goes on to discuss the right of the parties to FIFA’s non-disciplinary dispute resolution proceedings to request such a review when extraordinary circumstances arise similar to those that open the way for review proceedings against national and international court decisions and awards in Switzerland. In favour of filling the gap in FIFA’s regulations governing its internal system for resolving non-disciplinary disputes, reference can be made to: the application of Swiss law subsidiarily to FIFA regulations, given that not only is the action for review recognised in Swiss law against court decisions and arbitral awards, but also, with regard to the latter, before the PILA expressly provided for this action, the Swiss Federal Court agreed that the regulations allowing review proceedings against national awards should also apply to international awards, extending by analogy the rules adopted by the legislator for, in principle, only national awards; and to the existence of review proceedings both in FIFA’s disciplinary dispute resolution procedures and in the regulations of other international federations. Finally, it concludes that the review action constitutes an essential guarantee of substantive justice and institutional legitimacy in the international sports dispute resolution system, which, in light of the arguments set out in this article, cannot be denied to the parties to FIFA’s non-disciplinary dispute resolution proceedings, particularly when both parties come from jurisdictions where they would have had recourse to the action for review.

You can download the article via this link.