After the first Call of Interest for arbiters to be appointed by ECU Arbiters’ Council in European Championships was launched in 2019, pursuant to the relevant regulations (available here) the Arbiters’ Council launches the second Call on Interest for 2022 European Championships.
From the first ones, there are several news:
- Following a lot of comments regarding the languages’ evaluation, the rules about languages have been significantly changed:
English is considered to be the working language for any arbiters’ staff, thus arbiters will get points according to their English knowledge level, which means that also native speakers will get points in this regard.
Also, the levels have been deeply simplified and they are now only two (basic and advanced).
Other languages will be anyway valued since arbiters will receive extra points if they speak more European languages at conversational level (3 in case of five or more languages, 2 in case of three or four languages, 1 in case of one or two languages). - The Arbiters’ Council also decided to value the experience that arbiters got at a national level, to give a chance also to very experienced arbiters who, unfortunately, never had the chance to be in one European or World Championship.
Hence, there will also be points for any experience in FIDE rated events where a FIDE Arbiter norm can be achieved, differentiated according to the role (Chief Arbiter or others).
On the other side, the Arbiters’ Council at his meeting during the ECU Congress in Terme Čatež (SLO) also clarified some important operational aspects:
- Any Arbiter will not be appointed from this poll more than once per year.
- Arbiters will be invited according to their grading and preferences for a particular tournament, but after two refusals or missing answers to the invitation, the arbiter will be removed from the list for that year.
- The Council Members are forbidden to take a part in the Call of Interest, since they are composing the managing body of the programme.
It is also very important to notice that for 2022 the Council will follow Arbiters’ preferences to invite them, as it was originally planned for 2020.
However, in case of some major change in the calendar, as it happened the last time, the Council may decide to invite Arbiters regardless of their choices.
The Call of Interest will be running until January 14th.
IA Marco Biagioli