# Global Witness The London investigative NGO that invented the conflict-resources field, helped build its first regulatory regime, quit that regime in disgust, and then demolished the traceability scheme that was supposed to make the second regime work. ## The founding document ***A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and Governments in the Angolan Conflict***, published **1 December 1998**, was the first NGO report to connect the mainstream diamond trade to war financing — specifically UNITA's control of Angola's alluvial fields, in a war it framed at roughly 500,000 dead. Its argument was that the absence of scrutiny of how the diamond trade functioned had prevented any serious examination of corporate culpability. Six months earlier, UN Security Council Resolution 1173 had imposed the first diamond embargo. The two together produced the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]]. ## Quitting the Kimberley Process Global Witness helped create the KP and left it in **December 2011**, after the scheme certified diamonds from Zimbabwe's Marange fields — where security forces had killed more than 200 people in 2008 — on the grounds that the violence was committed by a government rather than a rebel movement, and therefore fell outside the definition of a conflict diamond. The organisation's departure is the clearest statement anyone has made about what the KP's narrow definition actually costs. See [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]]. ## The ITSCI Laundromat Published **26 April 2022**, and the most consequential single piece of work in this cluster since *A Rough Trade*. It alleged that [[ITSCI]] — the dominant bag-and-tag traceability scheme for tin, tantalum and tungsten in the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi — was **laundering** rather than filtering: giving minerals from armed-group-controlled and child-labour sites a clean paper trail. The specifics were what made it stick. In one South Kivu area, only 20% of tagged material in a quarter came from validated mines. At another site, cassiterite was tagged at fifteen times the production of the two validated local mines. A senior ITSCI figure in Rwanda estimated that **only about 10% of the minerals the country exported had actually been extracted there.** Downstream, the traced material reached Apple, Intel, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola and Tesla. ITSCI rejected the findings as sensationalised and noted, correctly, that it is not a certification programme and does not guarantee conflict-free minerals. The Responsible Minerals Initiative nonetheless allowed ITSCI's recognition to lapse in 2022–23. ## The coltan work, 2025–26 An April 2025 investigation traced EU trader Traxys buying Rwandan coltan against UN findings of at least 120 tonnes a month smuggled from Rubaya. A June 2026 follow-up found **five of Rwanda's seven largest coltan exporters** buying from the M23-controlled area and identified over 2,000 tonnes of smuggled coltan entering global supply chains — "the largest contamination of mineral supply chains in the region in a decade" — reaching Sony, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, LG Display, Ericsson, Toyota and Vodafone. ## The method Worth noting for its lineage: Global Witness's core technique is comparing what a country exports against what it can plausibly produce. That is [[E. D. Morel]]'s method from 1901, applied with better data. ## See also [[ITSCI]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[Rubaya Coltan Mine]] · [[Rwanda]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]]