The three Cs — Confidence, Compliance, and Credibility — constitute the strategic framework proposed by India to help focus our collective efforts during the 2026 Chairmanship.

Udi Sheintal, Secretary of the World Diamond Council, has been associated with the Kimberley Process even before it was named as such. He also has represented a government Participant, and, later a KP Observer.

The fact that a permanent secretariat was so long in coming was largely due to the fact that the KP has never been a legal entity, but rather an impromptu coalition of countries, industry representatives and civil society bodies.

The KPCS could not credibly operate without each legitimately produced diamond being properly accounted for, and thus the need for reliable statistics was understood from the outset to be of critical importance.

A milestone, years in the making, was registered on November 5, 2022, during the Kimberley Process Plenary meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, when the body greenlighted a recommendation made by a Technical Expert Team (TET) chaired by the World Diamond Council, proposing that Botswana become the site of the prospective KP Permanent Secretariat. It is projected to begin operations in January 2024.

The explicit reference to a Review and Reform Process in KP’s Core Document is of particular significance, because it represents recognition that the KPCS is a work in progress, and it will need to adapt and evolve according to current conditions.

As a mechanism designed to prevent the infiltration of conflict diamonds into the legitimate supply chain, the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) differs from most regulatory systems that are applied internationally. This is because it has not implemented uniformly in each and every country, but rather according to rules that have been ratified separately by legislation or decree, usually at the national or federal level, or the regional level, as is the case in the European Union.
The Kimberley Process (KP) itself does not have legal authority, as does for example bodies like the United Nations or World Trade Organization, both of which have the ability to dictate certain terms to their members. This notable shortcoming is a primary justification for the KP’s often-criticized consensus decision-making system. The simple logic is that the best to way to ensure that all parties remain on board with a resolution is to have them agree to it in the first place.
The KPCS essentially is an agreed to framework and set of guidelines, that are individually applied and operated in each member country, and a method for reporting approved exports of rough diamonds, which can be checked and verified when they arrive at their port of destination.
The architects of the KPCS understood the KP’s limitations, but also realized that the effectiveness of the KPCS, both functionally and from the perspective of how it is perceived by others, would depend on its minimum standards being met in every one of the countries and regions that were part of the process. They thus devised a system by which the members of the tripartite body, including all government Participants, but also the Observers from industry and civil society, would periodically and systematically review and critique the implementation of the certification scheme in the individual nations. It is knoqn as the KPCS Peer Review system.

Conflict resolution is not only a primary goal of the Kimberley Process. It is also a means for achieving another key objective, which is creating the conditions necessary for sustainable economic and social development, most often in very regions where artisanal and small-scale diamond miners are active.

To many, the two seem to be interchangeable, with both frequently and often confusingly being encountered within the same texts, as if they are synonyms, writes Mark Van Bockstael in his column Digging Down Into the Kimberley Process.

Each and every KP country – or “KP Participant” in KP-speak – issues certificates that look and feel different to those of its neighbors. Over the years, diamond traders, forwarders, customs agents and law enforcement professionals have complained about the lack of standardization, and how it impacts on them doing their job. For one thing, they say, it makes looking out for counterfeits more complicated than it should be.

For clarification purposes a footprint refers to distinct physical characteristics that make up the particular profile of the rough diamonds mined at a specific geographic location. They are the result of both chemical and geophysical processes that occurred naturally at the site over sometimes millions of years, affecting diamonds from the same deposits in common ways.

Several times a year, with uncanny regularity, the international diamond trade receives alerts from the Kimberley Process (KP) about yet another false certificate that has been encountered, and for which it is asked to practice enhanced vigilance.