FIFA adds woman to executive committee
Reuters - Tuesday 22 May 2012, 11:49
FIFA co-opted a woman to its
executive committee for the first time on Tuesday and continued
its reform process by pressing ahead with changes to its ethics
committee.
Lydia Nsekera, the president of the Burundi Football
Association, will be installed as the co-opted executive
committee member at the 62nd FIFA Congress this week with the
formal election of a woman on the committee to follow at next
year's Congress, football's governing body said in a statement.
Nsekera, 45, is a member of the women's football and the
women's World Cup committees and is also on the organising
committee for the Olympic Football Tournaments having been part
of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since 2009.
FIFA also confirmed its ethics committee is being
restructured with a new system involving two committees to be
established - one to investigate matters and the other to
adjudicate on them.
An announcement on who would lead the committees had been
expected on Tuesday but one of the candidates was ill so it was
deferred.
"In view of this, the executive committee decided to hold
an extraordinary meeting to designate both chairmen together
once the FIFA Congress has approved the relevant amendments to
the FIFA Statutes, which will come into force 60 days after the
Congress," a FIFA statement said.
The meeting will take place in Zurich in the first week of
July when the new Code of Ethics is adopted and both chairmen
will be named.
There was no such delay for Domenico Scala, a Swiss-Italian
business executive, who was appointed as the independent
chairman of FIFA's Audit and Compliance Committee, with the
appointment to be ratified at Congress.
In other matters, FIFA said its players' insurance programme
was being extended to cover the Olympic tournament.
It also named six cities to host next year's Confederations
Cup in Brazil, the warm-up tournament for the 2014 World Cup
finals.
Brasilia, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Recife,
and Salvador have been approved as venues, but FIFA said it has
contingency plans and match schedules in place based on only
four or five cities being fit to host games because of continued
worries over stadium rebuilding.
Kosovo also took a major step towards full membership of
FIFA with other nations given approval to play friendlies
against the eastern European nation.