William Kirtley

Justice Cannot Be Too Slow

Kirtley later served as a legal consultant in the Office of the Prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Working in the Military I Unit, he assisted the prosecution of senior army commanders alleged to bear responsibility for the 1994 genocide. He also worked as a consultant to the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, drafting material for the Repertoire of the Practice of the Security Council, the constitutional and procedural guide to the Council’s proceedings.

His lasting observation from Arusha concerned time. People affected by the tribunal’s work, he recalled, were unimpressed by its pace and doubted that it was addressing their problems. “Justice cannot be too slow,” he concluded.

In commercial and investment proceedings, evidence can weaken, projects can remain frozen, and capital can stay trapped while a case continues. Kirtley treats procedural speed as part of the dispute’s real-world cost because delay affects the project, the evidence, and the investment long before an award resolves the case.

Two Legal Traditions

At Harvard, Kirtley wrote an honors thesis on the history of empiricism and the way claims become accepted knowledge. He then studied American common law at Columbia Law School and earned a Maîtrise en droit from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

The two systems placed American pleading, precedent, witness examination, and discovery beside French approaches to written submissions, proof, contractual interpretation, and judicial reasoning. That combination is practical in an arbitration where the contract may use one country’s law, the hearing may sit in another, and the lawyers, witnesses, experts, and arbitrators may come from several legal traditions.

A Franco-American dual national, Kirtley is admitted in New York and Washington, D.C., and is an inactive avocat at the Paris bar. He works in English and French, has professional ability in Spanish and basic Arabic, and retains Bambara and Baoulé from his Peace Corps service.

Building an International Practice

At Shearman & Sterling’s Global Dispute Resolution Practice in Paris, Kirtley worked at the outset of Hulley Enterprises Ltd. v. Russian Federation, the UNCITRAL proceeding associated with the Yukos dispute. His work there also involved energy, construction, shipping, mining, technology, and joint-venture disputes under national and international law.

At Salans, now Dentons, his matters included Rumeli Telekom v. Kazakhstan, Lemire v. Ukraine, and Rompetrol v. Romania, as well as disputes concerning an aircraft lease, customs modernization, and industrial construction. He later served as Of Counsel at Lazareff Le Bars, where he was co-lead counsel in an investment-treaty arbitration concerning Belarus and a UNCITRAL dispute with a United Nations agency.

As a partner at DK AARPI, Kirtley handled ICC, ICSID, UNCITRAL, and SIAC matters, began sitting as an arbitrator, and advised the World Bank Group on arbitration-related civil-procedure reform. Having worked in both large international teams and specialist boutiques, he founded Aceris Law in Geneva in 2014, and as its Managing Partner has since served as counsel or arbitrator in more than two hundred international arbitrations, with disputes spanning five continents.

His later treaty and public-international work has included successful ICSID proceedings involving Kazakhstan and Ukraine, a successful UNCITRAL treaty arbitration involving a French pharmaceutical company and Poland, counsel for Barotseland, and work on a human-rights legal team before the International Court of Justice.

What the Technical Record Must Prove

Kirtley’s matters have involved petrochemical facilities, cement plants, electricity networks, desalination works, aviation leases, mining rights, shipping cargoes, digital assets, and algorithmic trading. They have proceeded under ICC, ICSID, UNCITRAL, LCIA, SCC, SIAC, ICDR, HKIAC, DIAC, JAMS, and PCA rules and under laws drawn from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Construction and commercial disputes require tribunals to decide where a schedule failed, which contractual actor controlled the cause, whether a financial model measures the promised counterfactual, and how the governing law assigns responsibility. Expert evidence supplies the engineering or financial analysis. Counsel must connect that analysis to the contract and the event the tribunal must decide.

Kirtley tests an expert model against its source data, identifies the assumption that controls the result, and looks for the contemporaneous document that can confirm or disprove the disputed account. The purpose is to let the tribunal move from project events, calculations, and technical choices to breach, causation, valuation, and relief without an unexplained gap.

Ventilators Promised to the Maldives

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Maldives contracted with a Dubai supplier for ventilators that were not delivered. Aceris represented the State in the resulting arbitration before the Maldives International Arbitration Centre.

The 2024 award ordered repayment for the undelivered equipment, liquidated damages, interest, and reimbursement of the Maldives’ arbitration costs. The case converted a failed public procurement into specific relief measured by the contract and the State’s payment record.

Holding a Sovereign’s Courts to Account

Kirtley and the Aceris team represented Bachar Kiwan in an investment dispute with Kuwait. A denial-of-justice claim does not ask an international tribunal to act as an ordinary appellate court over national judges. The domestic proceedings must cross the line from legal error into a fundamentally unfair use of judicial power.

A March 10, 2025 award addressed a criminal conviction entered against Kiwan in his absence for human smuggling even though he was the person allegedly smuggled out of Kuwait. The tribunal found that the conviction could not coherently apply protections intended for trafficking victims to treat the alleged victim as the trafficker. It also identified due-process defects in litigation over Kiwan’s media enterprise and irregularities in a related defamation proceeding.

The tribunal held Kuwait in breach of the treaty’s fair-and-equitable-treatment obligation, including denial of justice, and rejected Kuwait’s request for more than $6.6 million in arbitration costs. Kirtley’s task was to organize several domestic records into one treaty case without asking the tribunal to review every underlying decision anew.

Zeph Investments v. Australia

Kirtley served on the three-member tribunal in Zeph Investments v. Australia, alongside presiding arbitrator Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler and Donald McRae. The proceeding turned on the treaty requirement that an investor “has made” an investment.

Zeph had issued its own shares in exchange for shares in an Australian company associated with the Balmoral South iron-ore project. The tribunal accepted that a cashless share exchange can qualify in appropriate circumstances. It unanimously found, however, that Zeph’s exchange supplied no economic contribution of the kind the treaty required.

The tribunal also separated ordinary shareholder oversight from a distinct contribution and found that profits retained by the Australian company were not funds Zeph had received and reinvested. Kirtley joined the unanimous award even though Zeph had appointed him to the tribunal. The appointment selected an arbitrator; the treaty text and transaction record determined the result.

Scholarship, Teaching, and an Open Library

Kirtley’s scholarship addresses the procedural questions that determine whether a party can bring a claim, obtain evidence, and enforce an award. His work has examined asylum obligations, the transfer of treaty claims, enforcement involving sub-Saharan African states and parties, discovery under 28 U.S.C. § 1782, the ICSID Convention, security for costs, OHADA arbitration, clean hands, and French public-policy review.

He has taught at the University of Paris X and Paris II Panthéon-Assas, served in editorial roles, and advised the World Bank on alternative-dispute-resolution legislation. The recurring subject is access: corporate nationality affects treaty protection, evidence rules affect what can be proved, and sovereign-immunity and asset-location rules affect whether an award can be enforced.

Aceris also publishes a multilingual open library with procedural guides, an arbitration dictionary, treaty databases, deadline and award-timing tools, a search engine spanning leading arbitration sources, and model Requests for Arbitration and Answers under multiple sets of rules — placing the working instruments of the field within reach of parties everywhere.

Counsel and Arbitrator

Kirtley has served as sole arbitrator, co-arbitrator, and presiding arbitrator in administered and ad hoc proceedings involving construction, manufacturing, real estate, commercial contracts, and investor–State disputes.

The two sides of his practice impose different duties. As counsel, he selects the contract terms, project events, expert assumptions, and legal authorities that support the client’s position. As an arbitrator, he must decide from both parties’ submissions and the governing law. In each role, the amount claimed is only the scale of the dispute. The record still has to prove the fact the governing text makes decisive.