When buying diamond jewellery from Element Jewellery, you can be assured that to the best of our knowledge all diamonds sourced by our jewellers are supplied by diamond merchants who support the initiative of the Kimberley Process?
The term conflict or ‘blood’ diamonds, as they are sometimes called, refers to alluvial diamonds found in various parts of Africa which were illegally exploited to fund rebel militias in a series of wars during the 1990s in which many hundreds of thousands of people died.
The countries in which conflict diamonds have been a problem are Angola, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Guinea. The situation has been dramatically improved by the introduction in 2003 of the Kimberley Process. This is a global system backed by governments, the UN and various NGOs for managing and certifying the international trade in ‘rough’ diamonds. ‘Rough’ is the term used to describe diamonds as they come out of the ground before they have been cut and polished.
The Kimberley Process is now law in all EU countries and in around 40 other countries worldwide and is undoubtedly working to regulate the flow of diamonds and to exclude conflict diamonds from the supply chain.