Institutional Setting of Administrative Tribunals: The Case of the Inter-American Development Bank Administrative Tribunal (IDBAT), with References to Its Peers

In the last few years, the topic of international administrative tribunals (IATs) and their case law has sparked the interest of academics and practitioners, primarily due to the increasing number of such tribunals now up and running and the cross-pollination of their decisions (For a recent comment, see for example, De Cooker. “Proliferation of International Administrative Tribunals,” in Asian Journal of International Law, 2022. 12, 232–247. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2044251322000170 ; and De Baere et al. (eds.) The Contribution of International Courts and Tribunals to the Rule of Law, particularly Chap. 2, p. 19. For an additional analysis, please refer to Amerasinghe, The Law of the International Civil Service. Vols. I and II, 1994). Analyzing the case law of the various tribunals and comparing them as if they were part of a harmonious body of case law risks flattening the work of these tribunals towards the lowest common denominators, losing track of the tribunals’ specificities, their configuration, and the culture of the respective institutions where they sit. In fact, the debate is often focused on the analysis of the case law of the IATs as if IATs were seamlessly dialoguing amongst themselves to form a harmonious body of case law, and tends to underestimate the cultural, contextual, legal, and language differences of each tribunal and the nature, composition, and functions of the institutions they serve, which all have an impact on the decision-making process. This is not to underestimate the “jurisprudential cross-fertilization” for which it is even to “be expected that that contemporary international tribunals remain increasingly aware of the case law of each other, in their common mission of imparting justice in distinct domains of international law, thus preserving its basic unity.” (In Cançado Trindade, “Prologue: An Overview of the Contribution of International Tribunals to the Rule of Law,” in de Baere and Wouters, The Contribution of International and Supranational Courts to the Rule of Law, 2015, p. 13.). This chapter examines, from a practitioner’s perspective, the specifics of the Inter-American Development Bank Administrative Tribunal (“IDBAT”) and how it works in practice. It covers the independence of judges (by analyzing their qualifications and selection, relationship with the organization, emoluments, and terms of office) and their geographic representation, and how these factors impact the day-to-day work. The chapter considers the characteristics of the IDBAT Secretariat and its staff and its place in the institution more generally, as well as the mechanisms put in place to increase the transparency and accountability of its activity and the IDBAT’s work vis-à-vis the staff and the institution’s Board of Executive Directors (The IDB Board of Executive Directors comprises 14 executive directors representing the 48 member countries of the IDB).