The Kimberley Process: what it does, what it does not, and what to ask for instead.

1. Where the Kimberley Process came from

In the late 1990s, civil-society reporting and UN investigations established that the rough-diamond market was financing armed insurgencies in several West and Central African countries, most prominently Angola (UNITA), Sierra Leone (RUF) and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rough sold to fund these conflicts became publicly known as "blood diamonds" or "conflict diamonds".

In May 2000, diamond-producing African states convened in Kimberley, South Africa, to draft a multi-stakeholder response. The negotiations included producer governments, consumer governments, the World Diamond Council, and civil-society NGOs (notably Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada). The outcome, formally adopted in November 2002 and entering into force in January 2003, was the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS).

South Africa hosts the founding name and the founding meeting, but the KP is not a South African scheme, it is an international one with rotating chair countries. As of 2026 there are 59 participants representing 85 countries (the European Union counts as one participant).

2. What the KP actually certifies

The KPCS does three things, and only three:

1. It defines a conflict diamond as "rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments." (UN General Assembly resolution 55/56, 2000.)
2. It requires every shipment of rough diamonds crossing an international border between participants to be accompanied by a tamper-resistant Kimberley Process Certificate, issued by the exporting country's government, attesting that the rough is conflict-free per the above definition.
3. It requires participants to ban the import of any rough shipment from non-participants, and to ban exports to non-participants.

That is the entire scope. The KPCS:

• does not cover polished diamonds;
• does not cover lab-grown diamonds;
• does not certify the labour conditions under which the rough was mined;
• does not certify the human-rights record of the producing government;
• does not certify the environmental impact of the mine;
• does not require chain-of-custody traceability beyond the KP certificate at the border.

Inside the trade, the KP is paired with the System of Warranties, an industry-led commitment created by the World Diamond Council that passes a written guarantee statement along the chain from rough buyer to polished retailer. The Warranty travels on invoices and has the wording: "The diamonds herein invoiced have been purchased from legitimate sources not involved in funding conflict and in compliance with United Nations resolutions. The seller hereby guarantees that these diamonds are conflict-free, based on personal knowledge and / or written guarantees provided by the supplier of these diamonds."

3. The four well-documented limits of the KP

Civil-society organisations that helped draft the KP (Global Witness, Partnership Africa Canada, Human Rights Watch) have publicly pointed out four well-documented limits of the scheme. None of these limits are a secret; they are openly discussed at every KP plenary.

1. The narrow definition of "conflict diamond". The 2003 definition only covers rebel-against-government financing. It does not cover government-against-civilian violence, even where that violence is financed by state-controlled diamond production. Several documented cases over the past two decades fell outside the KP definition for this reason.
2. Polished diamonds and re-cutting. Once rough has crossed a border with a KP certificate and been polished, the polished stone moves through the trade without further KP-level documentation. The industry's System of Warranties statement is the only explicit chain-of-custody marker after that point.
3. The artisanal and small-scale mining sector. A meaningful share of African rough comes from artisanal mining. Capturing this output formally, with KP certification, requires sustained government investment. In several producer countries this has been uneven.
4. Reform takes consensus. The KP makes decisions by consensus of all participants. This makes it difficult to update the definition of "conflict diamond", every participant must agree. The narrow definition has been broadly agreed-on by NGOs and many governments, but consensus reform has been slow.

These limits do not mean the KP is worthless. The consensus position, including from civil-society organisations that have criticised the scheme, is that the KP has materially reduced the share of conflict rough in international trade since 2003 and remains a useful baseline. The honest framing is: KP-compliant is the floor of formal-sector trade, not the ceiling of ethical sourcing.

4. What to ask for beyond the KP

For a buyer who cares about provenance beyond the KP baseline, three categories of additional documentation are worth asking for. None of them are universal yet, but each is meaningful where it is available.

Asking the seller "what documentation beyond the Kimberley Process travels with this stone?" is a fair question. A working bench will answer it. A re-seller often cannot.

5. How Prodiam's chain holds together

Every rough parcel that arrives at the Procut DCW bench carries a Kimberley Process Certificate. That is the baseline. On top of that, the Prodiam chain adds:

• De Beers DBCM origin. Most of our rough is bought direct at De Beers DBCM viewings in Johannesburg under the Emerging Beneficiation Customer contract. De Beers operates under its own Best Practice Principles, audited annually, with public reporting.
• SA Beneficiation Licence. All cutting and polishing happens at the Bedfordview cutting works under SA Diamonds Act 1986 licence AP5057/3 (valid through 2029), inspected by SADPMR. This is more than KP requires; it ties the polish to a regulated SA manufacturer with specific beneficiation conditions.
• Independent SA rough sources. A smaller share of our rough comes from licensed SA tender houses (Kimberley, Wolmaransstad, Schweizer Reneke) and the State Diamond Trader. All of these are formal-sector, KP-certificated, SADPMR-licensed.
• GIA-graded polish. Every centre stone we sell is graded by GIA, which means a third-party gemmological laboratory has examined the polished stone and verified its identity and grade.

That chain, KP plus De Beers BPP plus SA Diamonds Act plus GIA, is what allows us to answer a provenance question with specifics rather than a slogan. See the SA cutting and beneficiation explainer for the full structure, and /beneficiation/ for the commercial face of it.