Wilkinson heads to FIDE’s “World Court”

Attorney-at-law Ian Wilkinson, the President of the Jamaica Chess Federation, Chairman of the Magnificent Chess Foundation and the President of the Jamaican Bar Association, is scheduled to leave Jamaica on Wednesday, June 27, 2012 for Lausanne, Switzerland to sit on the Ethics Commission (“EC”), the disciplinary arm of FIDE, the World Chess Federation.

A number of interesting matters are scheduled to be heard by the EC during its sittings. A case that has attracted tremendous, worldwide attention is the complaint against Frenchman Sebastien Feller regarding allegations of cheating at the 2010 World Chess Olympiad in Russia. The EC will also be examining the decision by the Turkish organisers to exclude arbiters from a number of high- profile chess countries (including England, France, Germany, Ukraine and the USA) from officiating at the 2012 World Chess Olympiad scheduled for Istanbul, Turkey between August 27 and September 10, 2012.

Popularly called the “World Chess Court”, the EC is chaired by Italian Supreme Court judge Roberto Rivello. Wilkinson first sat on the EC in July, 2007 in Athens, Greece when it dealt with a number of cases including the famous “toiletgate” case arising from the 2006 world championship match between two former world chess champions, the Bulgarian grandmaster Veselin Topalov and the Russian grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik.

Wilkinson has sat on subsequent hearings including Berlin, Germany in May, 2010 and Siberia, Russia in September, 2010. He was originally appointed to the EC by FIDE during its Congress in Italy in 2006 and was re-appointed unopposed at the Congress of one hundred and fifty nations in Russia in 2010.

Jamaica Chess Federation
June 26, 2012