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Conflict Diamonds

The illicit trade in diamonds has funded wars and human rights abuses for decades, resulting in the death and displacement of millions of people. There is a reason they are dubbed ‘blood diamonds’.

Global Witness was the first organisation to bring this issue to the world’s attention. Our ground-breaking report, A Rough Trade, released in 1998, exposed the role of diamonds in funding the civil war in Angola. It put the diamond industry’s secretive practices into the spotlight, prompting governments and industry to take action to eliminate conflict diamonds from global markets.

An international governmental certification scheme, known as the Kimberley Process, was set up to prevent the trade in conflict diamonds. Despite these positive steps, the issue has not gone away. The links between diamonds and abuse will only be fully broken when all companies involved in the trade change their behaviour.

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