Is it fair having technical panel and judges from the same country?

The title/question came to me after watching the last two skating competitions. All the judges are list their affiliation as ISU, but all of them have had national affiliations.

An example of this was the 2012 Worlds ice dance competition, where the technical specialist was Marie Bowness (CAN), and on the judging panel was Jodi Abbott, of Edmonton, Alberta. The ISU once passed a rule to prevent having two judges from the same country, after there was controversy when Sonja Henie won one of her world titles when there were two Norwegian judges on the panel.

The tech panel decides the levels, etc...and the judges assign scores. Is it fair to have two from the same country?

http://www.isu.org/vsite/vfile/page/fileurl/0,11040,4844-179484-196702-110011-0-file,00.pdf

The above document lists the nationality of most of today's tech panel members.

Bowness is indeed Canadian.
The other tech specialist is Monica MacDonald of Australia.
The technical controller is Linda Leaver of the US.

In the Team format, it appears there is a judge from every team on the judges' panel, including Canada, France, Japan, Russia, Italy, & the US. This gives every country with a representative in the event an equal opportunity to politick, and that seems fair enough.

The tech panel thing only requires collusion between 2 people to produce a skewed competition. Consequently, if I had my way, in the GPF and WTT formats, there would never be a tech panel member from a country who had a skater in the event.

At worlds, I would bar tech panel members from the countries whose members qualified for the GPF.

I think that would be more likely to bring some fairness to the process.

In gymnastics, they do something even more extreme (but I guess that's because they have a smaller panel with which to work), where if you have an athlete in the final, you do not have a judge. The upside of this is supposedly less politics. The downside is that a lot of these countries have judges that are less-experienced than the athletes and coaches would like. Also, whether we like it or not, there are, I'm sure, cliques amongst judges. Very junior judges most definitely want to be included in the "right" clique for their career, so they will most likely be influenced by a more senior judge.

But back to my original question--Doris, I fully agree with you. I think if you have a competitor in the event who made the free skate, no one who has had ties to your federation can serve as a member of the technical panel (and that includes country-hoppers, like Katalin Alpern).