Governments Inaction, Allowing Smuggling and Human Rights Abuse Threatens KP

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), which monitors the world trade in rough diamonds, is failing, according to the 2009 edition of Partnership Africa Canada's Diamonds and Human Security Annual Review. The failure of the KPCS, the report says, is by governments at the center of its administration which refuse to get tough on blatant smuggling, human rights abuse and money laundering.
 
This year's review, which includes detailed investigative reports on more than a dozen diamond producing countries, says that the cost of a collapse would be disastrous for an industry that benefits so many countries, and for the millions of people who depend directly and indirectly on it. "A criminalized diamond economy would re-emerge," says PAC's Executive Director, Bernard Taylor, "and conflict diamonds could soon follow." The problems, he says, "can and must be fixed."
 
Accountability is the primary issue, PAC states, adding that there is no central KPCS authority. The KPCS "chair" rotates annually and has virtually no responsibility beyond a convening function. Problems are shifted from one "working group" to another; debates on vital issues extend for years and "consensus" in the KPCS means that everyone must agree and that a single dissenting government can block movement.
 
Weak monitoring means that cases of flagrant non-compliance are regularly ignored until they became media scandals: Ivorian conflict diamonds smuggled through neighboring countries; 100 percent of Venezuela's diamonds smuggled out of the country. The tracking of diamonds was the main purpose of the KPCS, to guarantee that they come from a known, clean source. But in two of Africa's largest diamond producers - Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - internal controls are still so weak that nobody can be certain where the diamonds they export really come from.
 
Trade and production statistics from Lebanon, Guinea and the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville have raised unanswered questions. And the KPCS has taken more than a year to come to grips with smuggling, mismanagement and a government massacre of more than 200 diamond diggers in Zimbabwe.

PAC and NGOs from Africa, Europe and the U.S. are calling for serious reform at the November meeting of the Kimberley Process in Namibia, and for serious action on the scheme's many outstanding problems. "The KPCS is too important to fail," says PAC's Susanne Emond, "and it is too important to too many countries, companies and people to be a sham. It does not need to be redesigned; its provisions need to be enforced."