News of Bobby Fischer's recent misfortunes and the debate surrounding it seems to focus on the man: what do you think of Bobby, is he really insane etc etc. While we seem fixated on the psychology of an apparantly mad genius aspect of the story, few seem troubled by the more relevant human rights issues that have been raised.
Bobby Fischer has been wanted in the US since 1992 for violating a US injunction, signed by George Bush the elder, against playing a rematch of his world championship battle with Boris Spassky. The reason for the injunction was that the US had sanctions against Yugoslavia where the match took place. Fischer has not returned to the US since and is known to have lived in several countries since that time. The US has been unable to extradite him though as, despite the fact that many of these countries are friendly to the US, none of them would recognise his actions as a crime. It has also been suggested that there is a good chance the charges wouldn't even stick in the US on constitutional grounds. Over the next twelve years he basically faded into obscurity, re-emerging publicly only to introduce Fischerandom chess to the word.
In 2004 news broke that he had been placed in imigration detention in Japan for attempting to leave the country with a revoked passport. Over half a year later he is still there. Fischer claims that the passport was revoked without informing him. If true, and it appears to be, this is a clear violation by the US of their own rules. This is compounded by the fact that Fischer has been denied his right to challenge the passport revocation. It would appear for all the world that the US has engineered a virtual imprisonment and possible backdoor extradition of it's wanted man. All it had to do was take the human rights it claims to uphold as a shining becon to the world and flush them down the potty.
Japan, meanwhile, has had no real reason to hold Fischer other than their rules say he can't stay with a revoked passport and they have no place to send him other than the US, which he has fortunately been able to fight on legal grounds so far.
The government of Iceland, sympathetic to Fischer's plight, issued a special travel permit that would allow him to stay there despite not having a passport. One would think that having held a man in what amounts to jail for several months the Japanese government would have been eager to minimize the unneccessary detention of somone who, after all, had committed no crime. Instead, they have dismissed the fact that he has means to leave the country because his legal fight not to be sent back to the US was still not settled. Of course the legal fight is irrelevant if they'd just release him. It appears for all the world that they want to keep him locked up. Sure they have no beef with him, but we all know it pays to stay on the American's good side.
Of course, this is just a take on the situation as I have been able to gleen it from the various media sources. The point is we have what appears to be a case of human right's abuse and nobody seems to be paying any attention to it. There are too few voices calling the US and Japanese governments to task over their actions. You would think that the meer appearance of human rights abuses would have these government scrabling to tell their side of the story. Instead they have been able to sit back and let the antics and storied past of Bobby Fischer steal the show.