The KP Civil Society Coalition is the formal NGO observer bloc within the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. It is one of three constituent groups recognised in the KP, alongside Participants (sovereign states and the European Union, which act on behalf of member states) and Industry Observers (chiefly the World Diamond Council). The Coalition has no vote, but it is admitted to plenary and intersessional meetings, contributes to working groups, and holds the moral authority to publish independent reports on compliance.

Origin and composition

The Civil Society Coalition is the successor to the original NGO grouping that pressed governments and industry to negotiate the scheme during the 1999 to 2002 period. Founding members included Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada (now IMPACT), both of which had documented the role of rough diamonds in financing the civil wars in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the 1990s. Their Heart of the Matter and The Rough Cut reports were instrumental in convincing De Beers and other major industry players to accept regulation.

The contemporary Coalition draws members from African producer states and from Northern advocacy NGOs. Recurrent participants over the past decade have included CENADEP (Democratic Republic of the Congo), the Centre du Commerce International pour le Développement (Côte d'Ivoire), the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, IMPACT, and various civil society research institutes. Membership shifts as funding cycles and political circumstances change.

Role within the scheme

The Coalition has three functions. First, it provides ground-level reporting from producing communities, particularly in artisanal and small-scale diamond mining areas, where state monitoring is thin. Second, it produces independent technical analysis on compliance and reform questions, contributing to the Working Group on Monitoring, the Working Group of Diamond Experts, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Review and Reform. Third, it serves as a public voice for affected communities at plenary meetings, lobbying for resolutions on review missions, peer-review monitoring, and definitional reform.

Withdrawals and tensions

The Coalition's relationship with the KP has been periodically strained. Global Witness withdrew in December 2011, citing the scheme's failure to address human rights abuses at Marange in Zimbabwe and its inability to keep pace with the changing nature of conflict in diamond-producing regions. In 2015 and again in 2017, individual Coalition members boycotted intersessional meetings to protest at perceived obstruction by certain Participants on the question of broadening the conflict diamond definition. The Coalition as a body returned to full participation in subsequent years and has continued to argue for definitional reform.

Reform agenda

The Coalition's central long-running policy demand is that the KP definition of conflict diamond be widened beyond its current narrow scope (rough diamonds used by rebel movements to finance war against legitimate governments) to encompass diamonds linked to systematic human rights abuses by any party, including state security forces, private security companies and corporate actors. This is the core of the so-called KP reform debate. The Coalition also presses for stronger peer-review monitoring, mandatory due diligence under the OECD framework, and improved transparency in production statistics.

Significance for the trade

For working jewellers and dealers, the Coalition matters because much of the public information flow about responsible sourcing in the diamond trade originates with its members. Reports from IMPACT, Global Witness (through 2011) and other Coalition organisations frame the agenda of trade-press coverage, NGO advocacy, customer-facing journalism and the Responsible Jewellery Council's certification standards. Awareness of these reports allows merchants to anticipate questions, structure due-diligence files and avoid being caught flat-footed by stories that move from NGO publication to mainstream reporting in the space of a week.