MOSCOW, January 24. /TASS/. Court hearings into a dispute between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) should be open to public, RUSADA Deputy Director General Margarita Pakhnotskaya said on Friday.

A number of Russian sports federations as well as the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee (ROC) sent their official notifications to CAS earlier this month expressing their intention to participate as a third party in the WADA-RUSADA dispute.

"I believe that hearings into the RUSADA-WADA case in Lausanne must be open, since we are speaking here about a future verdict on clean sports," Pakhnotskaya told journalists. "This is my stance at the moment unless there are no infringements on the rights of witnesses in the case."

The press office of CAS announced to TASS on Thursday that the court rules imply confidentiality in a RUSADA-WADA dispute.

On December 9, 2019, the WADA Executive Committee (ExCo) approved the recommendations of its Compliance Review Committee (CRC) to revoke the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) and to strip Russia of the right to participate in major international sports tournaments, including the Olympics, Paralympics and world championships, for a period of four years.

The WADA ExCo also ruled that Russia must not host, or bid for hosting any major international sports tournament in this four-year period. Russian state officials, as well as the staff of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee (RPC), were banned from attending all major international sports tournaments for this four-year period.

The RUSADA Supervisory Board recommended on December 19 the agency’s Founders Council to disagree with WADA’s sanctions against Russian sports and to take this case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland’s Lausanne. On December 27, RUSADA sent an official notification of its disagreement to WADA and the global anti-doping body turned this case over to the Swiss-based court.