A defiant Caster Semenya who has refused to take drugs to slow down her running, has finally appealed to the Supreme Court of Switzerland to overturn the recent ruling against her by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in favour of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
IAAF President Sebastian Coe, a Briton, has seen the South African superstar winning all her 30 races in a row, including the last 800m she won in Doha, Qatar last month.
This led him to come up with a negative solution to stop the undisputed dominance of the double Olympian and World Champion 800m runner in world’s running tracks in the past decade.
That solution was to draft an anti-human rights regulation demanding that Semenya, who is a woman and raised as such, should drug herself six months before every race in order to compete “fairly” by slowing her running in reducing her high testosterone levels.[a1]
Semenya, however, has rejected the IAAF’s human rights abuse regulation, saying that Coe or anybody else cannot force her to take unneeded drugs whose side effects in her body were unknown.
Filing the appeal, which focuses on the IAAF regulation’s abuse of her fundamental human rights, the defiant Semenya reminded Coe: “I am a woman and I am a world-class athlete. The IAAF will not drug me or stop me from being who I am.”
In the appeal, she has requested the Swiss Federal Supreme Court to set aside the decision of the CAS in its entirety so she can resume running her 800m races which have now been halted in conformity with the much condemned IAAF rule that Coe introduced soon after succeeding Senegalese national and IAAF President Lamine Diack some years ago.
Leading Semenya’s appeal to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, Dr. Dorothee Schramm of Sidley Austin LLP in Geneva noted: “The IAAF regulations violate the most fundamental principles of Swiss public policy. In the race for justice, human rights must win over sporting interests.”
NM/as/APA