Conflict-diamond report raises ’serious questions’ over Lebanon
Posted in News by Admin on October 30th, 2009
Lebanon and a number of other countries are failing to comply with international measures governing the diamond trade, a tersely worded report said last week. The Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS or KP), is a non-legally binding process sanctioned by the UN in 2003 aimed at certifying the origin of rough diamonds from sources free of conflict fueled by diamond production.
The certification scheme is designed to prevent conflict-diamonds from entering the mainstream rough-diamond market and was established to assure ethical consumers that their purchases were not financing war and human-rights abuses.
But with several members, including Lebanon, failing to comply with KPCS requirements, the scheme now risks “failing,” the annual report by the non-governmental organization Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), said Thursday.
The report outlined several cases of “flagrant noncompliance” which PAC said were ignored by the KPCS until they became media scandals. Examples included corruption in Brazil, weak internal control mechanisms in Angola and blatant diamond mining and smuggling in Venezuela.
“In addition, production and trade statistics from Lebanon … raise serious questions,” the report said. It added that KPCS had become a “talk shop, with civil society acting as watchdog of the industry and the Kimberly Process itself.”
Lebanon, which joined the KPCS in 2007 to regulate its budding polishing industry, has not been satisfactorily probed by the process over its internal regulations, PAC said. “It seems … that polishing ideas have been put aside, and quite a nice little import-export business has developed: about 2.5 million carats a year.”
Beirut exported some $48,475,333 worth of diamonds in 2008 but appears to import them at a fraction of their worth, the report said, implicitly suggesting Lebanon was purchasing diamonds from dubious sources.
“More than 97 percent of all diamonds leave Lebanon soon after they arrive. And something miraculous happens to quite a lot of them: 85 percent of the diamonds arrive as industrials worth a couple dollars a carat, but some 250,000 more carats leave as gem-quality diamonds than arrive – worth 36 times their import value.”
“You might think that regulators worth their salt would have jumped on this … when the first reports of it surfaced early in 2009, but six months later when we went to press, the KP was still only asking polite questions and getting very little from Beirut in return,” the report added.
If the KPCS was to collapse, it would spell disaster for the diamond industry and the millions of people in developing countries who directly or indirectly rely on it, PAC said.
“A criminalized diamond economy would re-emerge and conflict diamonds could soon follow,” the organization’s executive director Bernard Taylor said.” KPCS’s failures, while significant, “can and must be fixed,” he added.
PAC’s Susanne Emond said : “The KPCS is too important to fail. It does not need to be redesigned; its provisions need to be enforced.”
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