Conflict Diamond Trafficking

The illegal trade of diamonds, also called blood diamonds, mined or traded in areas affected by armed conflict and used to finance rebel movements and other armed groups, most prominently in late twentieth and early twenty-first century conflicts across West and Central Africa including Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Diamonds are especially vulnerable to this kind of trafficking because their high value relative to their small size and weight makes them easy to smuggle, and armed groups have exploited alluvial deposits, which require only basic tools to extract, to fund operations and evade international sanctions through black market channels and organized crime networks. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, established in 2003, attempts to keep conflict diamonds out of the mainstream market by tracking rough diamonds from mine to market and requiring certificates of non-conflict origin, with participating countries barred from trading with non-participants.