The Right to Sport: A Human Rights Reading of the FOSCC Final Report
All 98 Calls to Action from the Future of Sport in Canada Commission's Final Report, Transforming Sport in Canada: Time for Action (March 2026), analysed through a human rights lens. Each call is mapped to international standards that define how governments should reform (Participation, Accountability, Non-Discrimination, Empowerment, Legality) and what good sport looks like (Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, Quality) — grounded in the Canadian Charter, international treaties, and Indigenous rights frameworks.
That framework already exists. Canada has binding obligations under international law — the rights of children, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and everyone's right to participate in culture and sport. These are commitments Canada has made but has seldom delivered on. It is time to. Those obligations give the ecosystem something that 98 Calls to Action on their own cannot: a basis for deciding what comes first, who is accountable, and what standard "good enough" actually has to meet. Values may inspire action. Rights require it — and provide a pathway to implementation. A human rights-based vision for Canadian sport shifts the conversation from who gets funded to what are we building together, and why — and the 98 Calls to Action from recommendations into obligations that Canada can be held to. This tool makes that case. It maps each Call to Action to the Canadian Charter, international treaties, Indigenous rights instruments, and two frameworks used in international human rights practice — PANEL and AAAQ — explained in full below.
Foundational Human Rights Principles
These four principles underpin all human rights — they are the conceptual foundation on which the PANEL and AAAQ frameworks rest.
Universality
Human rights belong to every person without exception. The right to sport applies to all Canadians regardless of identity, location, ability, or circumstance.
Inalienability
Human rights cannot be taken away, surrendered, or forfeited. An athlete's right to safe, dignified participation in sport cannot be waived by contract, policy, or institutional convenience.
Indivisibility
All human rights are equally important and cannot be ranked. The right to safe sport is inseparable from the rights to equality, dignity, and cultural participation.
Interdependence & Interrelatedness
The realization of one right depends on the realization of others. Safe sport requires equality; equality requires participation; participation requires accessibility.
Legal & Policy Grounding
The mappings in this tool are not aspirational — they are grounded in existing law. Canada has ratified international treaties, enacted domestic legislation, and affirmed political declarations that together create clear expectations for sport as a site of human rights realization. The instruments listed below form the legal and policy foundation on which every mapping in this tool rests. They represent obligations Canada has already accepted — the question is not whether these commitments exist, but whether our sport system is organized to honour them.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Domestic Legislation & Policy
International Human Rights Instruments
- UNCRC — Convention on the Rights of the Child
- UN Committee on the Rights of the Child — General Comment No. 17 (2013): The right of the child to rest, leisure, play, recreational activities, cultural life and the arts
- CRPD — Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
- CEDAW — Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
- ICESCR — International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
- ICCPR — International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
- CERD — International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
- UNDRIP — UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
- UNESCO International Charter of Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport
- TRC Calls to Action 87–91 — Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- Kazan Action Plan (2017) — UNESCO
- Commonwealth Sport Lekwungen Declaration on Reconciliation and Partnership with Indigenous Peoples
- A/79/299 — UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights: The Right to Participate in Sports (2024)
- UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011)
Canada has ratified UNCRC, CRPD, CEDAW, ICESCR, ICCPR, CERD. In 2024, the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights published the first dedicated report affirming that sport participation falls within the scope of cultural rights under international law.
Canada's International Engagement
- Centre for Sport and Human Rights — Advisory Council member (joined November 2024)
- Canada was an observer to the Enlarged Partial Agreement on Sport (EPAS) of the Council of Europe, though it has since withdrawn from this arrangement.
Source Document
- Commissioner Lise Maisonneuve, Future of Sport in Canada Commission, "Transforming Sport in Canada: Time for Action," March 24, 2026
The PANEL and AAAQ Frameworks
PANEL: Five Dimensions of Human Rights
The PANEL framework was developed by the Scottish Human Rights Commission as a practical tool for applying a Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA). It defines the process principles — how reform should happen — ensuring that rights-holders participate in decisions, that duty-bearers are held accountable, and that legal protections are enforceable. PANEL is now widely used by governments, the UN, and civil society internationally as the standard for operationalizing human rights in policy and practice.
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P ParticipationThe right to have a voice in decisions that affect your life and communities.
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A AccountabilitySystems must be transparent and responsible for upholding rights.
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N Non-DiscriminationEqual treatment without prejudice based on identity or circumstance.
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E EmpowermentBuilding capacity and agency to claim and exercise rights.
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L LegalityRights protections grounded in law and enforceable mechanisms.
AAAQ: Four Dimensions of Rights Realization
The AAAQ framework originates from General Comment No. 14 (2000) of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which interpreted the right to health under the ICESCR. It defines the content standard — what the realization of a right actually looks like — and has since been applied across economic, social, and cultural rights including education, water, and housing. Applied to sport, AAAQ asks whether opportunities are available, accessible, culturally acceptable, and of sufficient quality to meet human rights standards.
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Av AvailabilityResources and services must exist and be accessible to all.
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Ac AccessibilityPhysical, economic, and informational access without barriers.
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Ae AcceptabilityServices and policies must be culturally appropriate and respectful.
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Q QualityStandards that ensure effective, dignified, and safe outcomes.
How to Use This Tool
This tool presents all 98 Calls to Action from Canada's Future of Sport Commission through a human rights lens. Each call is displayed as a card showing its theme, the human rights principle (PANEL) and dimension (AAAQ) it engages, its implementation timeline, and the duty-bearers responsible for acting on it.
Browse: Scroll through all 98 cards, or click any card to open a detailed view with the full human rights analysis — including the original call text, relevant Charter protections, international instruments, and rights-holders.
Filter: Use the filters above to narrow by theme, PANEL principle, AAAQ dimension, timeline, duty-bearer, or rights-holder. Combine filters to explore specific intersections — for example, all Participation-related calls with an Immediate timeline assigned to the Federal Government.
Share: Use the share button inside any card to share a direct link, or apply filters and use the "Share Results" button to share a filtered view with colleagues.
Methodology: A Human Rights-Based Approach
Each call to action has been mapped to the single PANEL principle and AAAQ dimension that best captures its primary human rights significance. In practice, many calls engage multiple principles simultaneously — a recommendation addressing athlete safety, for example, implicates accountability, non-discrimination, and legality. The mapping reflects the dominant dimension to support analysis and navigation; it is not intended to suggest that other dimensions are irrelevant.
Rights-Holders: Named & Structural
A human rights-based approach fundamentally changes our relationship to sport. When sport is recognized as a right — grounded in the right to participate in cultural life (ICESCR, Art. 15) and affirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights (A/79/299, 2024) — it follows that there are duty-bearers responsible for realizing that right and rights-holders entitled to claim it.
Rights-holders include all of us. But human rights law directs particular attention to those furthest from realizing their rights — those who face structural barriers to participation, safety, and dignity in sport. This principle, rooted in substantive equality, recognizes that formal equality (treating everyone the same) is insufficient when people face fundamentally different barriers. Substantive equality requires that systems be designed to address those differences and prioritize those who are most excluded.
This tool classifies rights-holders at two levels:
Named — the call to action explicitly identifies this group, targets their specific conditions, or addresses barriers they disproportionately face. The evidence is in the call text itself.
Structural — the FOSCC report establishes that this group faces specific barriers related to what this call addresses. The call creates systemic change that affects those barriers. The impact is real but operates through structural reform rather than targeted action.
Both levels are grounded in evidence from the FOSCC Final Report. Every assignment — named or structural — is traceable to specific passages in the report. This approach reflects the reality that most of the 98 Calls to Action are structural in nature: they reform governance, funding, oversight, and accountability systems. The groups most affected by those systems are rights-holders whether they are named or not.
On athletes: All 98 Calls to Action are understood to ultimately impact athletes. Athletes are therefore not listed as a distinct rights-holder category on individual calls. The rights-holder tags shown on each card reflect the specific communities most directly impacted by that call beyond the universal athlete population.
On "All Federally Funded Sport Organizations": Where a call to action identifies all federally funded sport organizations as duty-bearers, this refers collectively to National Sport Organizations (NSOs), Provincial/Territorial Sport Organizations (PSOs/TSOs), and Multi-Sport Organizations (MSOs) that receive federal funding.
Duty-Bearers
Duty-bearers are institutions obligated to respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of rights-holders. In this tool, duty-bearers are institutional — not individual. Coaches, administrators, and volunteers act as agents of institutional duty-bearers; the obligation to train, certify, screen, and oversee individuals sits with the institution that governs them.
Duty-bearers must respect rights (not violate them), protect rights (prevent others from violating them), and fulfill rights (take positive steps to realize them). This three-part obligation, together with the principles of progressive realization (taking deliberate, concrete steps toward full realization of rights), maximum available resources (prioritizing rights within available budgets), and non-retrogression (not taking backward steps that diminish rights already achieved), forms the foundation of human rights-based governance.
Duty-bearers in this tool fall into three categories: governments (who bear the primary legal obligation), sport system bodies (who bear operational responsibility within the frameworks governments establish), and delivery institutions — schools, clubs, and recreation facilities — where rights are ultimately realized or denied.
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Select any card to view the full analysis, including implementation timeline, duty-bearers, and rights-holders.
