Tips for Managing ESL adjudicators

This article is adapted from the Chief Adjudicator's report which I completed after the Haifa EUDC. It is customary for CA's to file a report for the next year's CA spelling out their experience from the championship, and (more importantly) evaluating the adjudicators in the championship. This second part is obviously confidential - I suspect that if those reports were made public, the CAs would have far fewer friends.

The main part of this report - offering detailed analysis of debating management techniques we used, and a summary of championship results

Second Language Conferencing.
The problem was particularly acute in Haifa with more than a third of the judges being Israelis, there were repeated complaints of them conferring in Hebrew. This is a problem I also know happened with Israeli adjudicators in championships abroad, and I have personally seen it also happen when judges of other nationalities sit in one panel. It enables them to coordinate opinion 'against' the third judge, and even if they don't - it leaves a bad taste of unfairness. I stressed it twice in the daily briefings, but I feel I should have done more to clarify that English is the only language for debating and adjudication.
Accent Bias. Every briefing in Worlds and Europeans stresses how important it is to be open-minded to ESL speakers with a heavy accent and imperfect English. Those statements are usually directed at the EFL part of the room, but the fact is that ESL adjudicators are usually harsher on their fellows than the British, Aussies etc. This may be because these judges have a harder time understanding what is being said, and so prefer English fluency. It might also be because in our native countries, the better and brighter debaters are usually better English speakers as well, and so our mind is conditioned to preferring people who speak better English.
1^st prop gets the room–
There is a rule of thumb in championships that says that 1^st prop gets the room to prepare, which is very fair indeed. It is crucial that it will be kept when the opening gov is an English speaking team. That is because the other teams can eavesdrop on what they say, whereas many ESL preparing teams can use their language (although, again, the top ESL teams do their prepin English).
Defining ESLhood –
This is a perennial problem, and I'm sure no single solution would satisfy all debaters, but here are my suggestions:

wouldn't the simplest criterion for ESL is – someone debates better in another language than in English?
Failing that, do note that ESL is a bit like virginity- you can lose it in several ways, but you can't 'become' a virgin. Therefore, certification should be done along the lines of