Inside the NADBank

This is not really a post about news or a case, but just a little inside into the world of international organizations. Today I attended a tour of the North American Development Bank located in San Antonio, TX. The NADBank is an international organization which helps finance environmental projects near the US-Mexico border. Each government has made a 50/50% capital contribution. Our tour guide was the general counsel for NADBank, Lisa A. Roberts. She was extremely knowledgeable in public international law having been with NADBank since its inception in 1993, helping to draft its charter and then in her current position.

The NADBANK is unusual in that it shares a charter with a sister organization BECC, but they are two distinct legal organizations. Also, NADBank and BECC originally had separate Boards of Directors, but now share a common Board. She said that the two groups will always remain separate because of politics. The NADBank was "given" to San Antonio because of their great support of NAFTA, and even though it makes sense to merge NAFTA and BECC, BECC is located in Juarez. Neither city wants to lose their organization, so you will never see it happen.

She shared some other interesting things in regards to how political international organizations are forced to be. For example, the Bank itself was only established to win Democrat votes to pass NAFTA. The Democrats had a lot of environmental concerns and thus the Bank was formed to help fund environmental projects along the US-Mexico border.

Then a few years ago their were rumblings from both the US and Mexico that the NADBank would be done away with and they were forced to get involved by convincing both sides. It turned out that the main proponent was a Mexican official on his way out of office that had no other reason than he did not like Development banks and thought Mexico should not be involved in any.

Another interesting thing Ms. Roberts told us was that in her position she does not handle a lot of the domestic law issues. She defers to local counsel in the border states and in Mexico for those issues. She is more of a manager and delegator. Most of the day-to-day things she does are focused on the internal aspects of the organization.

Lastly, she told us that one of her favorite things was using the privileges and immunities of the organization to tell a US agency (the EEOC) that they had no jurisdiction to hear an employee complaint. Like most international organizations, the NADBank has its own grievance procedure.

I hope that at least some of this information is new to you and gives you a better idea of the inner workings of an international organization. I know I left there with a much different picture of what an "international lawyer" does and how international organizations function in our society.