The Kimberley Process

Imagine a diamond mined in a conflict zone, its sale directly funding an armed rebel group rather than a legitimate government, ending up indistinguishable from any other diamond by the time it reaches a jewellery counter, exactly the problem that drove diamond-producing and trading nations, alongside industry and civil society groups, to establish the Kimberley Process in 2003, a certification scheme requiring rough diamonds to carry verified documentation proving they didn't originate from a conflict-funding source before they can be legally traded internationally.

India's role in this system runs deeper than most participating countries, given that roughly 90 percent of the world's diamonds pass through Surat, covered elsewhere on this site, for cutting and polishing, meaning Indian customs and industry bodies handle Kimberley Process certification checks on a genuinely enormous share of global diamond trade flow, making India's own compliance and enforcement quality directly consequential for the credibility of the entire global certification system, not just its own domestic industry.

India assumed the Kimberley Process chairmanship from January 2026, its third time holding this role, a position that carries real diplomatic weight, the chair country effectively sets priorities and mediates disputes among member nations, and India's repeated selection reflects both its central position in global diamond processing and its accumulated credibility on certification enforcement built up over previous chairmanship terms.

The Kimberley Process faces a genuinely evolving challenge from the lab-grown diamond boom covered throughout this page, since certified conflict-free sourcing was designed specifically around physical mine-to-market tracking of natural stones, a framework that simply doesn't apply to laboratory-grown diamonds, covered under CVD & HPHT elsewhere on this site, meaning the disclosure and certification standards developed for lab-grown diamonds, covered elsewhere on this site, represent an entirely separate, newer trust infrastructure running alongside, rather than replacing, the natural diamond world's decades-old Kimberley Process system.