The FIDE Charter : Discussions

Last week's post, The FIDE Charter, was based on a long extract of the minutes for the 90th FIDE Congress, Extraordinary General Assembly (EGA), which was held at the end of February. As long as that post was, there was one piece missing, which I marked '[Discussion]'. Later I extracted five main points from the EGA discussion:-

• New Member Federations must be a country recognized by the UN and the IOC.
• Presidents and delegates of the Federations need to have been members of that Federation for two years.
• The Council [is] entitled to approve the rules related to the title and rating system, while the [General Assembly] will still have the power to approve everything the Council proposes.
• The reason for the creation of a Zonal Council: the purpose of a Zonal Council is related to the development program and budget.
• The [current] elected bodies of FIDE will stay until the end of their term; Executive Board will be renamed as Zonal Council; current elected Commissions will be extended to two more years.

Those points are mainly quotes from the original minutes. As far as I can tell, the 'Council' and the 'Zonal Council' are two different groups. (NB: I should have taken this analysis a step further, by checking the wording of the final, published charter on these five points, but I didn't.) While I was looking for further discussions on the charter, I discovered a 16 page PDF presentation covering the main talking points.

FIDE CHARTER : Time for change

20200228_FIDE Charter FINAL.pdf

One particularly useful slide in the presentation, titled 'THE NEW FIDE', defined the functional groups within a hierarchy:-

GENERAL ASSEMBLY

An organ with the highest authority in FIDE

COUNCIL

A strategic and oversight FIDE body, with law-making and executive functions

PRESIDENT

An official FIDE representative in all external relations, manages day-to-day activities

ELECTED COMMISSIONS

Professional and independent organs for specific FIDE tasks

MANAGEMENT BOARD

An executive and operational body that assists the President in the day-to-day management of FIDE activities (without any legislative competencies)

I hoped to find more discussion on the forums of English-speaking FIDE federations, but came up with less than I expected. First, here's a report from the American federation: USChess at FIDE Extraordinary General Assembly (uschess.org; 'USChess Executive Director Carol Meyer reports from Abu Dhabi'), including a long comment by 'Allen Priest, President, USChess'. See also a short discussion started by the same 'President, US Chess': FIDE Extraordinary General Assembly (uschess.org/forums; February 2020). An earlier thread on the same forum presented some of the main discussion points: FIDE announces extraordinary General Assembly (ditto; December 2019). That last link is only available to members of USChess.

As for the forums of other federations, most of the discussion must have been offline or through back channels away from public view. Or maybe the charter just wasn't as controversial as might have been expected.