Paywalled article, but well worth paying for- Jens Weinreich is one of the only journalists who regularly reports on the FIE. Journalism like this needs to be funded.

This article centres on the response to the open letter published earlier this year, addressed to the IOC and signed by members of the fencing community from around the world.



Here is an extract.

>In May, this newsletter and other media have [reported on the open letter to the IOC president](https://www.sportandpolitics.de/athletes-and-coaches-demand-independent-investigation-of-fencings-world-governing-body-fie/) about the untenable state of affairs at the ***Fédération Internationale d'Escrime***. In response, the **FIE** went to court against the news agency *Reuters* – first to the Regional Court in Hamburg (*Landgericht Hamburg*), then to the Higher Regional Court (*Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht*). Let us look closely at what the courts actually held.

>I requested both orders from the Hamburg judiciary. They are by no means judgments; the decisions were issued in preliminary injunction proceedings. 

>At first instance, without any oral hearing, the FIE lost on both of its applications. 

>At second instance it achieved no more than a partial success. 

>The charge of corruption as a description of the state of affairs inside the FIE was classified by both courts as a permissible expression of opinion – with reasons that of course appear in none of the statements issued by the FIE and its lawyer.

>**We know the pattern; this kind of conduct is systematic. Sports multinationals run propaganda and distort the facts.**

>They are always ready to destroy their critics.

>So let us get to it:

>["Court of Appeal prohibits false claims about the open letter to the IOC"](https://fie.org/news/1703-international-fencing-federation-prevails-over-reuters-in-court-court-of-appeal-prohibits-false-claims-about-the-open-letter-to-the-ioc?ref=sportandpolitics.de), the FIE claimed during the night of 29 July 2026 in the headline of a so-called press release. A German version of this propaganda had gone out a few hours earlier over the German wire service ***ots*** – issued not by the international federation but by its Hamburg law firm ***Rechtsanwälte Steinhöfel***.

>The FIE is therefore asserting that a court of appeal decided to prohibit several *false claims,* and that the subject of that decision was the open letter to the IOC.

>**Now to the facts:**

>What was prohibited is not a plurality of claims but a single sentence from a report by the news agency *Reuters*.

>The objection to that sentence concerned only how *Reuters* described the signatories of the letter – not what the letter says.

>The prohibited sentence has not been found to be false. In German legal language it merely counts as "procedurally untrue" ("prozessual unwahr"), because the agency did not substantiate it to the prima facie standard applicable in summary proceedings.

>No court prohibited anything about the content of the open letter.

>The central substantive charge of the letter – corruption inside the FIE – was of course something the FIE also wanted prohibited. That part of the application was dismissed by both instances.

Fake governance at the FIE: two German courts let the word 'corruption' stand