Mega-Sporting Event Local Organisers and Human Rights

A mega-sporting event (MSE) is often too complex to have one single local organiser. For most recent Olympics there have been at least two entities - an event organising body and a separate delivery authority responsible for physical construction of venues and infrastructure. These two bodies often work in parallel, but each has responsibility for establishing sustainability standards, including human rights and workplace issues.

This report outlines the approaches that several organisers have taken in relation to human rights risk management around particular MSEs, including:

• the Vancouver 2010 Organising Committee
• the London 2012 Olympic Delivery Authority
• the London 2012 Organising Committee for the Olympic Games
• the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee
• the Rio 2016 Organising Committee
• the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee

The material in this report was originally written for the www.megasportingevents.org website to expand on and advance the research contained in IHRB’s 2013 report “Striving for Excellence: Mega-Sporting Events and Human Rights”. It is accurate and up to date as of May 2014. The www.megasportingevents.org website has since been updated and the original content replaced. The original content has been archived into this series of short reports to maintain their usefulness as early contributions to the body of research on mega-sporting events and human rights.