# Charmian Gooch Co-founder of [[Global Witness]] in 1993, with Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley — the organisation that invented conflict-resource campaigning and then spent thirty years documenting why its own inventions did not work. The early campaigns set the method: Cambodia-Thailand timber in 1995, which cut Khmer Rouge revenue by an estimated $90 million a year; then Angolan conflict diamonds from 1997, producing ***A Rough Trade*** in December 1998 and, through it, the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]]. Global Witness was nominated for the [[Nobel Peace Prize]] in 2003. Gooch delivered the organisation's most consequential judgment on **2 December 2011**, announcing its resignation as a Kimberley Process observer after the scheme authorised exports from Zimbabwe's Marange fields: > [!quote] Charmian Gooch, 2 December 2011 > "Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from." She won the **2014 TED Prize**, using it to launch a campaign against anonymous shell-company ownership — pushing beneficial-ownership registries, which is the same forensic instinct applied one layer up: if you cannot see who owns the buyer, provenance rules on the commodity are unenforceable. She stepped down as executive director in April 2022 and left the board that December. ## See also [[Global Witness]] · [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[Operation Hakudzokwi]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]