Mapping doping-related criminal legislation together: An informed stakeholder consultation

Abstract

Access to reliable, jurisdiction-specific information on the existence and scope of doping-related criminal legislation is essential for understanding how anti-doping policies are interpreted and enforced globally. While the globally adopted World Anti-Doping Code provides a private regulatory framework for sporting sanctions, governments have introduced doping-related criminal laws that vary in scope, legal form, and underlying rationale. In the absence of a centralised legal resource, navigating this policy space becomes complex and challenging. This study addresses this gap by combining desk research with a multilingual, semi-structured informed stakeholder consultation to map the presence and scope of doping-related criminal legislation, identifying at least thirty-seven jurisdictions that have criminalised doping-related behaviours and enabling the development of five legislative typologies: comprehensive, trafficking-focused, child protection, context-specific, and fraud-based models. These typologies reveal variations in the behaviours targeted, definitions employed, and penalties applied. Such divergences raise important questions about the coherence of global anti-doping efforts, particularly regarding the definition of doping and the interaction between public and private sanctioning. This study also demonstrates the potential viability of a distributed, multi-actor approach to legal data gathering and supports the development of a dynamic, centralised legal database to advance transparency, equity, and evidence-informed anti-doping governance.