Disciplinary Commission

Disciplinary cases live or die on evidence integrity. When statements arrive as Word attachments, video as WeTransfer links and exhibits as scanned PDFs from five different federations, defence counsel can attack chain of custody and have evidence struck.

The commission then proceeds on a weakened record, and serious offenders walk on technicalities. Beyond the legal risk, the operational burden of collating evidence by email is so heavy that small infractions go unprosecuted entirely, eroding deterrence.

Evidence Repository accepts uploads from federations, umpires and integrity partners with cryptographic hashing on receipt, immutable timestamps and access logging. Files carry their submitter, role and federation context.

Video evidence is transcoded and watermarked; documents are OCR'd and translated on demand. The chain of custody is exportable as a court-admissible record.

Due process requirements vary by federation and by national law — notice periods, language of proceedings, right to representation, deadlines for defence submissions. A case mishandled procedurally is overturned on appeal even when the underlying conduct is undisputed, freeing offenders and damaging commission credibility.

Manual case handling cannot reliably enforce the dozens of timing and notification requirements that apply across jurisdictions, especially when respondents speak different languages from commissioners.

Case Management drives every matter through configurable stages — intake, charges, evidence disclosure, written defence, hearing, decision, appeal — with statutory deadlines enforced and language-of-proceeding controls. Notifications go in the respondent's first language with verified delivery; hearings can be conducted via secure video with transcripts.

Every decision carries an audit trail that survives appeals and external review.

Today a player suspended in France can apply for a Belgian or Spanish licence months later, sometimes under a slight variation of their name, and compete openly. The information exists somewhere — perhaps in a French federation database — but it does not reach the licensing officer who makes the decision in Brussels.

International suspensions imposed by the Disciplinary Commission are even harder to enforce because there is no single source federations consult before issuing licences or accepting tournament entries.

International Suspension Registry is queried automatically by every federation's licensing flow and by every event organiser's entry validation. Sanctions imposed by the commission appear in the registry within minutes, with scope (national, continental, international), expiry, applicable disciplines and identity attributes that resist trivial spoofing.

Appeals Workflow keeps the registry status accurate as cases progress.