True Cost Of Mined Diamonds to Humans - Part 1

By Isabelle Lincoln-Moore 28th April 2026 5 min read

an image of a group mining diamonds in Africa in extreme conditions

The True Human Cost of Mined Diamonds: Conflict, Corruption and the Kimberley Process

Part three of four | Ethica Diamonds, Newquay, Cornwall

The previous blogs in this series looked at what diamond mining does to the land, the water, and the wildlife. This one is harder to write.

Because when we talk about what diamond mining does to people, we are not talking about abstract environmental statistics. We are talking about specific human beings -their homes, their safety, their freedom, their lives - and the ways in which the pursuit of diamonds has consistently placed those things at serious risk.

We want to be clear: this is not ancient history. These are ongoing realities.

Before the Kimberley Process

Diamonds have been financing conflict for as long as they have been commercially valuable. Long before De Beers' extraordinary marketing campaign convinced the world that diamonds represent love and commitment, rebel groups across Africa were using diamond mining territories to fund civil wars.

At the turn of the millennium, bloody conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other countries were being sustained by diamonds. Men, women, and children were captured or coerced into mining. Diamonds were stolen from legitimate operations and exchanged for weapons. The international jewellery trade absorbed these stones with essentially no questions asked.

International pressure eventually led to the creation of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme in 2003 - an international agreement intended to prevent conflict diamonds from entering the legitimate supply chain.

It was a significant step. It was also deeply, structurally inadequate.

The Kimberley Process: What It Does and Does Not Do

The Kimberley Process certifies batches of rough, uncut diamonds as conflict free. The scheme claims that diamonds from participating countries account for 99.8% of global production. Those are impressive sounding numbers.

Here is what the Kimberley Process actually prohibits: diamonds used to fund rebellion against a recognised government.

Here is what it does not prohibit: diamonds mined using forced labour, beatings, and killings carried out by or under the authority of that recognised government.

If a national government is sponsoring or turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in its diamond mining regions, the Kimberley Process has no mechanism to intervene. The diamonds can still be certified and sold internationally.

Zimbabwe is the most documented example. Exports from the Marange diamond fields have been permitted under the Kimberley Process since 2011, despite extensive and well documented killings, beatings, and forced labour perpetrated by or under the sanction of the ruling party. The diamonds were certified. The abuses continued.

Angola: Where Certification Does Not Mean Safety

Angola represents approximately 9% of global diamond trade. Its diamonds are permitted under the Kimberley Process because the civil war ended in 2002.

What has not ended is the brutality around the mines. Journalist Rafael Marques documented 500 cases of torture and 100 murders in his 2011 book Blood Diamonds and Torture in Angola. In 2009, 45 miners were buried alive by the army. Miners are routinely required to pay bribes to armed security personnel simply to protect themselves from violence.

In 2016, villagers were being displaced from their homes, their crops destroyed, their fruit trees felled, to make room for expanded mining operations. Armed police enforced these displacements. Compensation was minimal and non-negotiable.

The diamonds extracted from these operations are certified under the Kimberley Process. They are in the supply chain.

Botswana: The Bushmen and the Ghaghoo Mine

In the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana, the entire ancestral territories of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen were licensed for mineral extraction. The Bushmen were forced from their land in the 1990s through threats and persecution, with their water supply eventually cut off as a final coercive measure.

Following lengthy and difficult court proceedings, the Bushmen won a legal right of access to their water in 2011. In the same year, construction began on the Ghaghoo diamond mine on their ancestral lands. The mine operated from 2014 until it was mothballed in 2017 due to market conditions - though the Bushmen's access to their lands remains disputed. They continue to be denied access to their ancestral territory, living in government run resettlement camps in poverty, and face arrest for hunting as they have always done.

The Tracking Problem

Even setting aside the cases above, the Kimberley Process has a fundamental structural flaw that makes comprehensive tracking essentially impossible.

It certifies batches of rough, uncut diamonds at the point of export. Once those diamonds are cut, polished, and separated into individual stones, no authentication mechanism tracks them further. A certified batch and an uncertified, smuggled stone can sit side by side in a polishing facility with no reliable way to tell them apart.

Canadian diamonds are sometimes laser etched with identification marks to preserve their provenance through the cutting and polishing process. This is a genuine attempt to maintain traceability. It is also the exception, not the rule.

For the vast majority of mined diamonds, the honest answer to where did this stone come from is: we cannot be certain.

A Different Kind of Diamond

A lab grown diamond has a supply chain that is short, transparent, and entirely traceable. It is grown in a controlled facility, cut and polished under documented conditions, and certified by independent gemological institutes. There is no rebel group, no forced labour, no government sponsored brutality, no village displacement in its story.

At Ethica Diamonds in Newquay, every stone we sell is lab grown and independently certified by the GIA or IGI. We know exactly where it came from. We can tell you. That is not a marketing statement. It is just true.