LAUSANNE: The Palestine Football Federation has gone through with its threat to challenge FIFA at the Court of Arbitration for Sport over the conduct of last month’s world federation congress.

The Palestinian delegation to congress in Bahrain was angry at the latest delay in formal consideration of its complaint that Israel has breached FIFA statutes.

Israel’s football association includes, in its league competitions, clubs from the West Bank settlement which are considered as illegal by the United Nations.

Palestine has complained to FIFA that the IFA is thus breaching FIFA statutes which lay down that every member association should have jurisdiction over organised football in its territory.

A complaint to this effect was included in the congress agenda but consideration of long-delayed recommendations from monitoring commission chairman Tokyo Sexwale was pushed back to a FIFA Council meeting in October.

A long-winded CAS statement said it had “registered an appeal filed by the PFA  against decisions taken during the 67th FIFA Congress to not vote on a proposal raised by the PFA in which it sought the recognition of its rights to run football activities in accordance with the FIFA Statutes and to vote instead on an alternative proposal in which the FIFA Council was granted a time limit until the end of March 2018 to study and evaluate reports from the FIFA Monitoring Committee Israel-Palestine.”

The PFA wants the no-vote decision to be declared null and void and that FIFA be ordered to immediately vote on the PFA’s proposal.

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