Nobody in Belgium wants Russian “blood diamonds” any more, but the next round of EU sanctions still won’t ban them. “Consumers don’t want to buy diamonds with blood on them,” said Vicky Reynaert, a Belgian left-wing MP.
“Everybody knows what’s being done with the money by Alrosa [Russia’s biggest diamond firm] — it’s going directly to finance the war against Ukraine”, she said. Reynaert spoke to EUobserver after a Belgian parliament committee, on Tuesday (25 April), backed her resolution calling for the Belgian government to support an EU-wide embargo on Russian stones.
The consumers in Reynaert’s focus groups aside, Belgian MPs also voted unanimously in favour. And a plenary vote in two weeks’ time is expected to deliver the same outcome, the MP said. “Everybody agrees with our reasoning,” she said.
The resolution is non-binding, but will be an “important signal” hard for Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo to ignore, she added.
For the rest of this article: https://euobserver.com/world/156968