08 Dec Leonardo DiCaprio: The International Law Angle
Blood Diamond, which opens nationwide today, sounds like a dreadful movie, as movies whose central message is unsubtle social commentary so often are. But for obvious reasons it’s provoking a lot of interest in the role that the diamond trade has played in African civil conflict. You can find a good update of the conflict diamonds situation here, as well as this from Foreign Policy.
I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert, but the Kimberley Process seems to have accomplished something (the claim is that more than 99% of the world diamond trade is now clean), and presents an interesting model of global governance in which non-state actors play a central role. Although its institutional apparatus maintains the traditional hierarchy of IOs in which states maintain a privileged position over NSAs (see the so-called “Kimberley Scheme” here, the institution’s founding document, which distinguishes between state “participants” and NGO “observers”), it’s quite clear that nothing would come of any of this without the participation of the World Diamond Council, which represents the world’s leading diamond traders. Although the scheme is state-sponsored, it depends on industry self-regulation, through a system of supply-chain certification. That may be the system’s weakness, though, according to this report, so it will be interesting to see if the regime migrates to more traditional state-controlled mechanisms.
In the meantime, DiCaprio and the movie themselves are now a part of the picture as non-state actors of a sort, as they bring public consciousness of the problem to new, higher levels.
Some say that the Kimberley Process is no more than a public relations exercise for the diamond industry. However, one has to acknowledge the progress has been made in regulating “conflict diamond” trade due to the Kimberley Process. Additionally, a lot has to be done to in the forthcoming years to achieve more effective monitoring of diamond trades. In my opinion, until the diamond trade is subject to mandatory, impartial monitoring, there will not be any effective guarantee that all conflict diamonds will be identified and removed from the market. Two recent reports confirm these words. International NGO Global policy says that the lack of strong actions to strengthen the process and to respond to illicit diamond trade puts at stake the credibility of the Kimberley Process. Also despite the progress Global Witness in its report warns that the Kimberley Processes PCS is still not a “fully credible check on the international movement of diamonds.”