The international diamond trade responded to the conflict-diamond crisis with an unprecedented effort to trace rough stones from extraction to export. After the 2000 World Diamond Congress in Antwerp called for sealed shipments, criminal penalties, and exclusion from diamond bourses, industry representatives formed the World Diamond Council in January 2001. Governments, producers, and nongovernmental organizations negotiated the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which was approved by the United Nations in March 2002 and formally created later that year.
The system required participating countries to attach certificates to rough-diamond shipments and prohibited trade with nonparticipants. It brought larger volumes into official channels and was credited with helping Sierra Leone expand legal exports from almost nothing at the end of the 1990s to approximately $125 million in 2006. Yet critics argued that the scheme relied heavily on government declarations, did not fully address corruption or human-rights abuses, and defined conflict diamonds too narrowly. Its history is therefore both a regulatory success story and a cautionary tale: certification made the trade more transparent, but could not guarantee that every certified gemstone was free from exploitation.
