ICCF decisions regarding Russia and Belarus

[Tim Harding]

The International Correspondence Chess Federation held an extraordinary congress online a few days ago after a sufficient number of member federations (led by Spain) called for action against Russia and Belarus over their invasion of Ukraine.

This took some weeks to organise and federations had some extra days to vote even if their delegates did not attend the congress but the outcome has now been published to delegates (though not yet announced on its own website www.iccf.com which I find surprising).
I should mention that I was the Irish delegate to ICCF for about 25 years but resigned from that position some time ago, so the data below came to me from our current delegate.

After two procedural motions were carried, the four principal motions were whether to suspend the federations of the two countries concerned and whether to suspend the individual players of those federations.

The outcome was more or less in line with what FIDE has so far decided. Unlike FIDE, at present the ICCF executive and senior officials do not include anyone from Russia or Belarus.

The motions to suspend the federations were carried 33-10 in each case with 14 abstentions.
(ICCF does not have nearly as many member nations as FIDE; in particular China is not a member)

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales all voted for both national suspensions, as did France (the federation of ICCF president Eric Ruch) and many other but not all western European countries
Some of the countries which voted against can be guessed at but I was a bit surprised to see Canada and USA (also Germany) voted No while Australia were among the abstainers.

It is not surprising that more countries (or their delegates) were of the opinion that individual players should not be prevented from playing and those two motions were defeated.

18 voted to suspend Belarus players but 24 federations were against, and 15 abstained.
19 voted to suspend Russian players with 23 against and 15 abstentions.
The country which voted in opposite ways on this issue was Lithuania.

England and Finland were among the countries which voted to suspend the national federations but voted against suspending the players.

The Irish delegate took soundings among our players by email before deciding how to vote. I have no idea whether other delegates were mandated to vote as they did or how otherwise they came to their decisions.

According to another motion that was passed 23-19, decisions taken at the extraordinary congress will take effect when ICCF announce them and will cease to be effective at the end of the next ICCF congress, which is scheduled for mid-August, so in effect that Congress will have to decide all over again.
Moreover the executive committee has the power to end the sanctions before then if they consider the Ukraine situation has sufficiently improved. That hardly seems likely at present.

When international correspondence chess (which had been largely German-organised in the 1930s) was re-established after WW2 by the ICCA (precursor of ICCF) it was several years before Germany was admitted, although exceptions were made for some individual German players who had been anti-Nazi. In particular Edmund Adam, who had been in concentration camps, was given a place in the final of the first CC World Championship though he had not played in the preliminaries.

[Paul Cooksey]

deleted

[Tim Harding]

I'm disappointed to find out the ICCF isn't run by an AI

Have you nothing better to do than make such an inane comment on this serious matter? Shame on you.

[NickFaulks]

I'm disappointed to find out the ICCF isn't run by an AI

Have you nothing better to do than make such an inane comment on this serious matter? Shame on you.

Perhaps it was inane, but I laughed and that's the test.