Venezuela Agrees to KP Peer Review Mission

Agreement on how to treat rough diamond smuggling from Venezuela was reached at the fifth annual Kimberley Process plenary meeting. After negotiations seemed to fail, and many were pushing for its expulsion from the KP, the South American country submitted statistical and annual reports and agreed to a peer review.

The plenary endorsed a declaration on internal controls of participants, requiring governments to actively audit record keeping of trade, spot check trading companies, physically inspect imports and exports and maintain verifiable records of rough diamond inventories.

The plenary also decided to support efforts by Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to gaining control over rough diamond exports, in cooperation with the UN, with the intention of ending the ban on rough diamond exports that the UN Security Council has placed.

The Republic of Congo was re-admitted to the KP, after it was expelled in 2004 following a KP mission that found the country was dealing in millions of carats of smuggled diamonds from other African countries.

Finally, the plenary selected Namibia to serve as the vice-chair of the Kimberley Process in 2008. India will assume the chairmanship in January 2008 and Namibia will follow in 2009.

A reported record number of civil society organizations attended plenary. The NGOs issued a declaration calling on participant governments to engage with civil society in the implementation of the Kimberley Process in their home countries (see related article here: www.idexonline.com/Newsroom/ngoscallfo).