2004

New Group Aims Gives A Seal for Confidence

July 2004

An Antwerp company has joined forces with non –governmental organization Global Witness and the Antwerp workers union ICEM to develop a new seal that will stand for the Fifth C – “confidence.”

The new seal will not be available to consumers for some time, but the idea behind it is that a new organization, the Department of Minerals and Gemology, will give diamond companies a “stamp of approval” that assures consumers that the diamonds they manufacture were made with ethical business practices — meaning that they are not conflict diamonds and were not produced with child labor.

At the Diamond Registry, we support the goals of this seal, but we wonder how it can be monitored or bestowed. Giving a company a “blank check” saying that some companies are more reliable than other companies doesn’t make sense. Already the laws of the United States require that you cannot buy rough diamonds without a Kimberley certificate. Unless there becomes a way to track every diamond through the pipeline — and it’s been pretty clearly proven that is not scientifically possible — we don’t see how one company can claim that they are more “kosher” than all the others. We’ll have to wait and see, but for now this looks like a business move more than an ethical one.