Diamond & Jewelry News, Advice and Prices for Consumers
Diamond & Jewelry News, Advice and Prices for Consumers
August 30, 2010
I know the Kimberley Process is difficult to enforce, so I was wondering – have any of the founders ever just given up on their attempt to monitor the trade of conflict diamonds via this system?
September 6, 2010
Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Ian Smillie was among the founders of the Kimberley Process and he formally resigned in May 2009, precisely due to the difficulty in enforcing the system and the fact that KP has not proved to be nearly as effective as he had hoped it would be. As a conflict diamond expert in his own right, Ian Smillie decided that it was best for him to leave the system because he considers it to be a failure. Aside from the immense social implications of the conflict diamond trade which the Kimberley Process has not managed to curb in its entirety, perhaps the last straw for Ian Smillie was the KP's turning a blind eye to the smuggling of diamonds in Venezuela. Nonetheless, Smillie intends to continue to raise awareness of the problem of conflict diamonds, but after what he considers to be 6 years of poor results, he is doubtful about the diamond industry's capability of rectification. The list of human rights transgressions that the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme does not cover goes on and on, beginning with child labor, exploitation of workers, health violations, safety violations, unseemly wages, etc. Regrettably, civil wars also continue to be financed by the conflict diamond trade, and the distance between what the Kimberley Process claims to require and what it actually implements remains quite broad. The diamond industry may seem to have grabbed hold of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, but the actual solutions to the many problems have yet to be found. In spite of all the issues with KP, diamond buyers can still purchase diamonds that are conflict free. The best way to do so is to stick with Canadian diamonds, because these diamonds have definitely been tracked to the diamond mines where they were excavated. If the diamond industry still doesn't have the conflict diamond trade under control via the Kimberley Process, the only responsible thing we can do in the meantime is purchase Canadian diamonds.
