FIFA mired in peace prize, human rights controversy leading up to World Cup 2026

For Australian players and fans, the legal concerns are not purely theoretical. There’s a matter of visas, flights, airport scrutiny, and access to stadiums potentially monitored by ICE agents amidst a heightened, and very public, immigration crackdown. The Australian Socceroos have matches scheduled on 14 June in Vancouver, 20 June in Seattle, and 26 June in San Francisco. Group matches and first knockout rounds will be held in the three host countries, from the quarterfinals onwards only in US cities.

FIFA operates with its own comprehensive regulations governed by its Congress, the FIFA Council or the Secretary General. These are formulated and issued by the FIFA Legal & Compliance Division, with staff located internationally. There are the obvious rules governing the game itself (17 “Laws of the Game”), but there is also a set of laws governing the status and transfer of players (RSTP), football agent regulations (FFAR), eligibility rules (dictating national team selection guidelines), and the disciplinary code and code of ethics.

Emily Jackson heading up FIFA legal US

New Zealand-born Emily Jackson is the Deputy General Counsel and Director of Legal, US, at FIFA World Cup 2026, a role she’s held since December 2023.

LSJ Online first spoke with Jackson in 2023, when she was based in Sydney as the Head of Legal for the FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia­–New Zealand 2023. Her career has focused on entertainment and sports law, encompassing work for New Zealand entertainment law firm, McLaughlin Law; in-house legal counsel with Cricket Australia; and Senior Manager of Commercial Legal for Expo 2020 in Dubai.

As the event looms this year, Miami-based Jackson says, “It’s the biggest event I’ve ever worked on, and the size brings with it a lot of complexity. From a US perspective, the nuances of the applicable legislation obviously change on a state-by-state basis, which means that you are often having to consider multiple positions on an issue.  Ticket sales and attendance are potentially less of a concern given the high demand, so the focus for the organisation as a whole is ensuring the event operates smoothly and that all commercial rights are protected and delivered to the necessary standards.”

She explains that her responsibilities involve the day-to-day delivery of event operations and management of the legal team within the United States.

“In terms of the legal work we are doing, we are managing the relationships with host cities and stadiums across all US host cities, ensuring our requirements are met from a hosting perspective, plus managing all the negotiations associated with procurement, logistics and service delivery throughout the tournament footprint.”

This includes negotiating agreements for the sites that will be hosting teams, as well as assisting with their travel, accommodation and other needs.

“To add to that, we’re also dealing with the delivery of commercial rights on the ground and ensuring that our partners are protected. We also deal with the general legal administration that any company is faced with, including ensuring we are delivering in a manner that is legally complaint and in accordance with FIFA’s own best practices.”

Life cycle of event

Having moved over to work on this event after her role at the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 ended, she reflects, “It’s really quite a unique experience, in that we have built and scaled up an organisation in a matter of months, and will then wind it down relatively swiftly after the event is concluded – so in my role you get to witness the life cycle of the event delivery, from a start up with only a few employees, to building processes and procedures and hiring staff, to event delivery and then dissolution – all within a period of a couple of years.”

In regard to how FIFA’s internal judicial mechanisms operate in tandem with the host country environment, Jackson says, “FIFA’s code of ethics is designed to apply internationally, and across all jurisdictions – so by nature it is relatively complementary to the local legal landscape, in some cases supplementing or even going beyond the strict legal requirements.  FIFA’s laws of the game are also specific to the football context, so operate to govern the conduct of the sport itself, more than the operational delivery of the event within those jurisdictions.”

The task of working across Canada, Mexico, and the US for this year’s event has not been a piece of cake.

“It’s been relatively complex,” Jackson says. “One of the biggest challenges we’ve had to work through is in relation to visas and immigration law, and ensuring we’re compliant across all three countries while allowing staff and players to move freely. We’ve managed to get some really positive outcomes though. Each country can have quite different approaches to things like labour laws – which can make consistency of delivery across the tournament footprint challenging. However I have fantastic counterparts in Mexico and Canada, which has made tackling these challenges so much easier, and more enjoyable.”

Judicial mechanisms

At present, FIFA has three judicial mechanisms: the Disciplinary Committee, the Appeals Committee and the Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee focuses on matters pertaining to internal governance. Upon the recommendation of an Independent Governance Committee in 2012, FIFA committed to strengthening the Ethics Committee, including dividing it into its two chambers. Since his leadership, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has been subject to at least four complaints to the Ethics Committee.

In 2016 the FIFA Ethics Committee cleared Infantino following allegations that he had used private jets provided by a World Cup bidding country while working for UEFA, filled senior posts without checking candidates’ eligibility, billed FIFA for mattresses, flowers, a tuxedo, an exercise machine and personal laundry, and demanded FIFA hire an external driver to drive his family and advisors around while he was travelling.

In 2021, the Ethics Committee cleared Infantino of a complaint that was submitted in relation to allegedly improper meetings between the FIFA President and then Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber.

The Code of Ethics, particularly, raises some obvious questions around potentially conflicting laws and actions of the US administration. Additionally, Infantino has faced ethics complaints relating to the “FIFA peace prize”, a new initiative, awarded to US President Donald Trump in December 2025. FIFA has statutorily committed to political neutrality, though Infantino has insisted Trump “definitely deserves” a Nobel Peace Prize.

In December last year, UK human rights organisation FairSquare filed a complaint against Infantino with FIFA’s Ethics Committee. The complaint alleged multiple breaches of the obligation in FIFA’s Code of Ethics (FCE), which requires football officials to remain politically neutral.

Filed with the Investigatory Chamber to the Ethics Committee on 8 December 2025, the complaint referenced four instances in which Infantino expressed his public support for the actions and policies of the US President, Donald Trump. FairSquare requested that the Ethics Committee investigate Mr Infantino’s role in the decision to introduce a FIFA Peace Prize, the decision to award it to President Trump on 5 December, and the conformity of these processes with FIFA’s procedural rules.

Scrutiny on United States

In an editorial for The Guardian on 27 January, journalist Alexander Abnos wrote: “A country where safety is under threat from federal violence on the streets is not fit to stage soccer’s showpiece event.” He added: “Safety, justice, freedom, the continued functioning of society – these are all under threat.”

The same day of the editorial, former FIFA President Sepp Blatter advocated for boycotting World Cup matches in the US amidst security concerns, citing the deadly shootings of Renee Good by a US immigration agent and protester Alex Pretti by a federal agent.

Only a month earlier, on 17 December, Trump instigated travel bans on two additional countries – both competing in the World Cup, ensuring that fans will not be able to travel and see their national teams taking part. The Trump-signed proclamation of restrictions and entry limitations upon Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire resulted in 39 banned nations, joining Haiti, Iran, both of whom will be sending teams.

At the same time, the Trump administration’s World Cup taskforce has unveiled a fast-track visa system for World Cup visitors, putting ticket holders in a priority queue for visa interviews. There has been no clarity on the status of prospective visa applicant ticket holders from the banned countries.

In January, the administration announced the events it classifies as “major sporting events”, which participating athletes and coaches will be allowed to travel to the US for, despite visa bans on nearly 40 countries. The exemption includes “official events and competitions hosted or endorsed by FIFA, soccer’s governing body, or its confederations”.

A violation, not merely a contradiction

For Asser International Sports Law Centre, Finland-based Rasoul Rahmani, a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Turku, wrote in February: “According to the latest population data, the fully banned countries represent 479.3 million people. The partially restricted nations account for another 537.6 million. Combined, over 1.017 billion people, more than one-eighth of the world’s population, face barriers to entering the World Cup’s primary host nation.”

The upshot, whether it is legal or otherwise, is that: “The policy creates a two-tier system: the teams can play, but their people cannot watch.”

FIFA’s Human Rights Policy and the FIFA World Cup 2026 Human Rights Framework have made formal commitments that travel bans directly contradict. The Framework commits all host cities to stage the tournament “guided by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights”.

Further, Article 3 of the FIFA Statutes states: “FIFA is committed to respecting all internationally recognised human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights.”

Article 4 declares that “discrimination of any kind against a country, private person or group of people on account of race, skin colour, language, religion, politics, national or social origin, property, birth or any other status is strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion.”

FIFA’s structural flaws raise ire

In October 2024, FairSquare released a report that identified major structural flaws within FIFA that resulted in human rights violations. The report found that “FIFA’s operations entail very serious risks to a wide range of human rights and the organisation is guilty of serious due diligence failures, most notably in the run up to the Qatar 2022 World Cup, where it repeatedly failed to take steps to mitigate the serious human rights risks to migrant workers involved in preparations for the tournament. Its operations elsewhere have been linked to abuses including mass evictions, the destruction of livelihoods, police abuse, extrajudicial killings and other violations of the right to life, forced labour, and physical, sexual and psychological abuse.”

The report pointed to a failure to identify risks and take steps to mitigate them, breaching FIFA’s own human rights and social commitments. This included allegations that FIFA had pressured host nations of its World Cups to suspend or provide FIFA with exemptions from domestic labour laws, and the claim that FIFA “has deprived developing country hosts of hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue by demanding tax exemptions for itself and its partners”.

Co-director of FairSquare and author of the report, Nick McGeehan said: “Football is far too socially, politically and economically important to be governed this poorly. Only external regulation will provide the foundations for FIFA to deliver on football’s transformative potential and to prevent the organisation from causing more serious harm.”