The Kimberley Process: What the Conflict-Diamond Scheme Actually Covers

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, commonly abbreviated KPCS or KP, was established in 2003 in response to the conflict-diamond crisis of the 1990s in Sierra Leone, Angola, and Liberia¹. The scheme is a tripartite arrangement of governments, the diamond industry, and civil-society organisations, designed to certify rough diamonds at the point of cross-border trade.

Eighty-five participating countries currently take part, covering approximately ninety-nine point eight per cent of global rough-diamond production. The European Union represents its member states collectively. Participation is voluntary but, in practice, near-universal among diamond-producing and diamond-trading nations because non-participants find their rough excluded from major buyer markets.

The scheme operates through Kimberley Process certificates. Each shipment of rough diamonds crossing a participating border must be accompanied by a KP certificate verifying that the rough originated from a participating country and was not used to finance conflict against legitimate governments. The certificate is a paper-based system, with electronic implementations at some borders. Without a KP certificate, a participating country will not import the rough.

The KP defines conflict diamond as: "rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance armed conflicts aimed at undermining legitimate governments"².

The definition is precise and deliberate. It addresses the specific problem of the 1990s, where rebel groups in Angola (UNITA), Sierra Leone (RUF), and Liberia funded armed conflict by smuggling rough diamonds into the international market. The KP definition was designed to shut that financing channel by certifying that rough diamonds in international trade had not come from rebel-controlled areas.

What the definition does not include is the source of much later criticism of the scheme. The KP definition does not cover:

• Labour abuses in mines operated by legitimate governments or their licensed contractors. A diamond mined under hazardous artisanal conditions in a participating country can still be KP-certified if the mining operation is not a rebel movement.
• Environmental harm from mining. Open-pit operations causing significant land disturbance and water-table impacts are not within KP scope.
• Polished diamonds. The KP scheme covers rough only. Once a stone is cut, polished, and set, it leaves the KP framework.
• Smuggling once a certificate has been issued. Documented cases of certificate fraud and post-certification smuggling have been reported in trade press and civil-society analysis but are not, by design, addressed by the scheme.
• State-sponsored violence against citizens by legitimate governments, where the diamond revenues fund the violence rather than rebel movements opposing the government.

Reform of the conflict-diamond definition has been on the KP plenary agenda repeatedly since the late 2000s. None of the proposed expansions has passed³⁵.

The 2023 Dubai plenary is one of the more recent and best-documented examples. Civil-society participants and a number of European member states tabled proposals to widen the definition of conflict diamond to include human rights violations more broadly, including state-sponsored violence and severe labour abuses. Other participants, including Russia, blocked the proposal. The KP operates on consensus, so a single dissenting participant prevents change. The proposal lapsed.

The structural feature here is the consensus rule itself. The scheme was designed to operate by unanimous agreement to ensure broad participation and to prevent any single party from imposing its preferences on others. The same feature has, over time, made meaningful definitional reform near-impossible. International Peace Institute analysis and London School of Economics academic work on the KP have both highlighted this structural deadlock⁴⁷.

Global Witness, the civil-society organisation that was instrumental in launching the KP in 2003, formally withdrew from the scheme in 2011³. The stated reasons were the failure of the scheme to address the broader human-rights and environmental issues raised by diamond mining, and the consensus-veto paralysis.

Global Witness's continuing public position is that the KP, as currently constituted, is inadequate for addressing the ethical issues that consumers associate with conflict-free or ethically sourced diamonds. Other civil-society organisations have similar critiques. The International Peace Institute, the LSE academic literature, and various non-governmental analyses have all documented the gap between the KP's narrow legal definition and the wider ethical claims that retailers sometimes make in marketing⁴⁷.

India chairs the Kimberley Process in 2026⁶. The chairmanship rotates annually among participating countries. The current chair priorities, as reported by AWDC and trade press, include traceability discussions and continued plenary engagement on definitional reform. The plenary calendar for 2026 includes intersessional working group meetings and the annual full plenary later in the year.

Whether the 2026 work will produce structural change in the scope of the scheme is, given the consensus rule, uncertain. The pattern over twenty years has been that reform agendas survive on the agenda but do not produce binding changes to the conflict-diamond definition.

Lab-grown diamonds are outside the KP scheme entirely¹. The scheme covers rough mining and rough cross-border trade. Lab-grown diamonds are produced in reactors or presses inside production facilities (see Chapter 1), shipped through standard commercial freight channels rather than through KP-certified rough trade, and sold as polished gems to retailers. None of this is in the KP framework.

Whether this is an advantage of lab-grown depends on how the buyer frames the question. From the perspective of the original 1990s conflict-diamond problem, lab-grown bypasses the issue because there is no mining and no rebel-controlled rough. From the perspective of broader supply-chain transparency, lab-grown diamonds are typically traceable to a specific reactor and production batch via producer documentation, which is a different and arguably more granular form of traceability than the KP's batch-level certification of rough mining origin.

Both characterisations are correct. The KP is not a measure of whether diamonds are ethically sourced; it is a specific certification of rough mining provenance. The next chapter examines the broader ethical trade-off.

Where this fits in the reference

The Kimberley Process is one component of the diamond ethics picture. The next chapter, Environmental Impact, takes up the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of both production pathways. Chapter 12 structures the full ethical comparison across labour, environment, and provenance.