# Kimberley Process Certification Scheme The first attempt to regulate a conflict resource through international certification, launched in 2003 and still running — and the cautionary tale that every subsequent regime, including [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]], was designed partly to avoid repeating. ## Where it came from Sierra Leone's RUF and Angola's UNITA financed themselves through alluvial diamonds in the 1990s. **UN Security Council Resolution 1173** (12 June 1998) prohibited imports of Angolan diamonds outside a government certificate-of-origin scheme — the first diamond embargo, and the ancestor of certification logic. Six months later [[Global Witness]] published *A Rough Trade*, connecting the mainstream trade to war financing. Governments, industry and NGOs met at Kimberley, South Africa in 2000; the scheme launched in 2003. It works by **consensus among participants**, covering the overwhelming majority of world rough-diamond trade, with shipments moving only between participants under a government-issued certificate. ## The definition, and why it is the whole problem A "conflict diamond" under the KPCS is one used by **rebel movements** to finance war against **legitimate governments**. Everything the scheme cannot address follows from those two phrases. Violence by a state against its own population is outside the definition. So is violence by militias, mercenaries, criminal networks and private military companies that are not seeking to overthrow anyone. **Marange, Zimbabwe, October–November 2008.** Zimbabwean security forces killed more than 200 people in an operation to seize the Marange diamond fields. Because the perpetrator was the government, the diamonds were not conflict diamonds. The KP eventually certified Marange exports. Ian Smillie, one of the scheme's architects, resigned in 2009. [[Global Witness]] left in **December 2011**, saying the scheme had refused to confront the obvious. ## The 2025 reform failure The **Dubai plenary of 17–21 November 2025** was the serious attempt to fix it. The proposal would have expanded the definition to cover violence by armed groups beyond traditional rebel movements — militias, mercenaries, organised criminal networks, private military and security companies. Roughly **thirty countries endorsed it. It was blocked.** And the identity of the objectors is the instructive part: the **EU, Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland and Ukraine** — not because they opposed expansion, but because they insisted any new definition must **also cover violence by state actors**. That demand made consensus impossible under a rule that requires it. The plenary failed to issue a final communiqué — the **third consecutive year** without one. It also adjourned **without a 2026 chair**: Zimbabwe withdrew its candidacy at the last moment, Israel had blocked Qatar's bid, [[Belarus]] was rejected by Western states, and South Africa objected to the UAE serving a third year. Because chair appointments also require unanimity, the scheme spent over a year unable to fill the post. **India was elected by consensus on 5 December 2025 and took the chair on 1 January 2026** — its third time chairing. Ghana is vice-chair and chairs in 2027. India processes roughly 90% of the world's diamonds by volume and is also a major lab-grown producer, so it takes the chair with incentives aligned to trade continuity. At the Mumbai intersessional in May 2026, civil-society groups alleged the scheme is **repositioning itself as a marketing vehicle for the natural-diamond industry**, reading its "consumer confidence" theme as brand defence against lab-grown competition. > [!note] The structural lesson > A consensus regime containing the states most likely to be implicated cannot be reformed to reach state violence. The maximalist reform position and the minimalist blocking position produced the same outcome: nothing changed. This is the design flaw that Dodd-Frank tried to route around by regulating *companies* under one country's securities law rather than negotiating among governments — and that regime is now being dismantled by that country's own legislature. ## See also [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Operation Hakudzokwi]] · [[Ian Smillie]] · [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] · [[Global Witness]] · [[OECD Due Diligence Guidance]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]