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Conflict Minerals

NEWS RELEASE: Pact Report Sheds New Light on Conflict-Free Mining in Africa’s Great Lakes

Download the report, Unconflicted, on Pact’s website.

For more information about Pact’s work in mining globally, visit http://www.pactworld.org/mining.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul. 14 /CSRwire/ – Today, Pact released a report detailing the state of conflict-free minerals in The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The report provides an in-depth look at traceability and due diligence, as well as on-the-ground progress and challenges.

Throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region, the international community has closely watched, and regulated, the extraction and sale of conflict minerals – tin, tungsten tantalum (3Ts) and gold – in the hopes of curtailing ongoing violence.

In 2010, Pact, an international development nonprofit, along with regional governments, companies and other partners, began implementing the joint industry traceability and due diligence system developed by ITRI (the nonprofit global tin industry association) known as iTSCi (ITRI Tin Supply Chain Initiative).

“In the five years since the partnership began, iTSCi has protected and improved the lives of tens of thousands of miners across hundreds of mines,” said Yves Bawa, regional director for Congo, Rwanda and Burundi and iTSCi program manager at Pact.

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The darker side of solar power – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – May 28, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

The Saudi Arabian oil minister’s recent comment that the world’s largest petroleum producer sees a postfossil-fuel world in which his country becomes a solar-power superpower must have comforted climate activists that even the worst offenders can come around. After all, what could be more redemptive than turning abandoned oil fields into solar farms?

Solar power’s image as “clean” and “limitless” has led princes and politicians alike to dole out huge subsidies to bask in its glow. Under the 2009 Green Energy Act, Ontario agreed to pay solar power operators as much as 10 times the market rate for the electricity they produce under 20-year contracts.

Not satisfied with risk-free deals that will make many solar players rich at consumers’ expense, Ontario’s solar industry is now lobbying for even more. And it’s leveraging solar’s apple-pie image to press politicians into giving it what it wants.

On Tuesday, the Canadian Solar Industries Association (CanSIA) released a poll purporting to show that three-quarters of Ontarians “would like to see the government invest more in solar powered electricity and in technologies that enable solar power.”

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Conflict minerals the real link between games and violence – by Brendan Sinclair (Games Industry Biz – June 3, 2015)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/

Game industry’s track record of making sure its money doesn’t fund war crimes in DR Congo is improving, but still appalling

Massacres, child soldiers, mass rape, razed villages, summary executions… It’s all been happening the Democratic Republic of the Congo as armed groups have torn the country apart for years, in part funded by the sale of locally mined resources like tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold, sometimes abbreviated as 3TG or more commonly referred to as conflict minerals.

Yesterday, I covered Activision’s latest SEC filing on its sourcing of conflict minerals. The good news was that Activision has no reason to believe Skylanders or the other merchandise it sells are funding the violent conflict in DR Congo.

The bad news is that it couldn’t say the same thing last year. And as I discovered upon looking at filings from other big companies in the games industry, the worse news is that Activision’s position–based on surveys completed by its supply partners and unspecified “independent research”–is about as good as it gets.

Conflict minerals aren’t an issue for most games industry companies. Game discs don’t need conflict minerals, so the concern is generally limited to those making hardware or high-tech toys. For Activision, that means Skylanders and Blizzard merchandise.

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EU lawmakers seek ban on ‘blood metals’ in surprise vote – by Robin Emmott (Reuters U.K. – May 20 2015)

http://uk.reuters.com/

BRUSSELS – The European Parliament voted on Wednesday to ban all products that contain “blood metals” sold by African warlords, but the legislation is likely to be blocked by EU governments who fear it would impose an unrealistic burden on business.

The surprise result marked a defeat for the pro-business European People’s Party (EPP), the parliament’s biggest grouping, who need fellow centrist allies to pass laws following last year’s EU elections where protest parties did well.

The European Parliament voted 402 in favour versus 118 against with 171 abstentions on a proposal to require companies, including electronics firms, that buy gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten to certify imports do not finance warlords in Africa.

“Parliament votes for mandatory transparency against conflict minerals. Big success!” tweeted German Green Ska Keller after the vote in Strasbourg as some lawmakers broke out in applause while others stood in huddles, surprised by the result.

The result is set to paralyse the bill because European Union governments say firms across the 28 EU countries cannot track materials from small mines all the way through commodity exchanges to component manufacturers and the final product.

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Responsible Gold Also Means Supporting Livelihoods of Artisanal Miners – by Tyler Gillard and Roel Nieuwenkamp (Huffington Post – April 22, 2015)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theworldpost/

Last year, Congolese civil society leader Eric Kajemba helped broker a deal between the army, local authorities, three powerful Congolese families and a Canadian mining company to demilitarize the Mukungwe gold mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The mine supports 5,000 thousand so-called “artisanal” gold miners, who work in harsh conditions and have for years lived under constant threat of extortion and violence by armed groups, the military and criminal gangs.

Kajemba’s efforts, and the support from the mining company and the Congolese government, were made in part because of growing international pressure to ensure that minerals don’t finance or fuel violent conflict or human rights abuses when mined in conflict zones.

Yet this same push for “conflict-free” minerals has also created new challenges for mines in eastern Congo, like Mukungwe, to access formal gold markets, mainly because of unreasonably high expectations from the market that go beyond international standards.

In 2010, the US Congress adopted section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, obliging public companies to report on products containing certain minerals that may be benefiting armed groups in the DRC.

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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL NEWS RELEASE: Digging for Transparency: How U.S. Companies are Only Scratching the Surface of Conflict Minerals Reporting (April 22, 2015)

http://www.amnestyusa.org/

Click here for report: http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/digging_for_transparency_hi_res.pdf

Nearly 80 per cent of U.S. public companies analyzed by human rights groups are failing to adequately check and disclose whether their products contain conflict minerals from Central Africa, a new report by Amnesty International and Global Witness reveals.

The report, Digging for Transparency, analyzes 100 conflict minerals reports filed by companies including Apple, Boeing and Tiffany & Co under the 2010 Dodd Frank Act (Section 1502), known as the conflict minerals law. The findings point to alarming gaps in U.S. corporate transparency.

Under the law, more than one thousand U.S.-listed companies that believe they may source minerals from Central Africa submitted reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2014, the first year they were required to do so. The law is designed to reduce the risk that the purchase of minerals from Central Africa contributes to conflict or human rights abuses.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is an important source of minerals – including gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum – for global businesses.

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Catholic aid network urges European action on conflict minerals (Catholic Sentinel – March 17, 2015)

http://www.catholicsentinel.org/

OXFORD, England — An international consortium of Catholic aid agencies charged that European businesses are causing suffering and death by importing minerals from regions of the world experiencing armed conflict.

The Brussels-based International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity, or CIDSE, demanded firmer action by businesses to ensure that minerals used in consumer products such as cellphones and laptop computers are responsibly sourced.

“The exploitation and trade of natural resources finances armed groups responsible for serious abuses of local populations. We can all take action to end this violence,” said the CIDSE statement released March 9.

“In sourcing resources from conflict-affected or high-risk areas, European businesses risk fueling violence to the detriment of human rights, peace and development. In this way, blood minerals find their way into our computers, telephones and cars,” CIDSE said.

The statement was released ahead of March18-19 discussions in the European Parliament of a draft law, developed by the European Union’s governing commission, to control minerals from conflict-torn regions.

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India’s Conflict Minerals – by Anthony Loyd (National Geographic – April 2015)

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/

The gunman at the jungle’s edge lived and died by different names. Some knew him as Prashant, others as Paramjeet. Occasionally he called himself Gopalji, trading the alias with another insurgent leader to further confuse the Indian authorities trying to hunt him down.

When I met him, he was fresh from killing, and called himself by yet another name. “Comrade Manas,” he said as he stepped from the shadows beneath a huge walnut tree, machine gun in hand, a slight figure, his frame and features burned out and cadaverous with the depredations of malaria and typhoid, war and jungle.

The day was already old and the sun low. The silhouettes of a dozen or so other gunmen lurked in the deepening green of the nearby paddy fields, watchful and waiting. Manas and his men were on the move and had little time to talk.

In India they are known by a single word, Naxalites: Maoist insurgents at the heart of the nation’s longest running and most deeply entrenched internal conflict. Their decades-long war, which costs India more lives today than the embers of the conflict in Kashmir, has been described by former premier Manmohan Singh as India’s “greatest internal security threat.”

In the spate of violence 24 hours before our rendezvous, Manas, just 27 years old, and his men had killed six policemen and wounded eight more in an ambush across the range of low hills at whose base we now met.

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Uganda: Why Can’t Uganda Simply Stamp Out Blood Minerals? – by Jeff Mbanga (All Africa.com – February 18, 2015)

http://allafrica.com/

Let’s talk about blood minerals today. About nine years ago, I was assigned to write a story about Uganda’s gold exports.

Back then, as it is today, a number of government reports would list the amount of revenue the country earned from gold exports. However, you could hardly put a name to a company that exported gold, nor tell where this gold was mined, processed, and flown out.

As part of my prep, I looked up a company, which I will not reveal, that dealt in gold. I was lucky to be granted an interview with one of its top directors. We met at a secluded area, somewhere in Kisementi, at the outskirts of the central business district. The man, of Indian origin, made sure few people were at our meeting point.

He first questioned my interest in the story. He then went ahead and complained about the risks in the business, and told me of his fights with a rival company. By the end of our conservation, I knew this was not a trade for the faint-hearted dealers; the mafia were alive and well in this mineral trade.

After all these years, questions still loom large over the trade in gold in Uganda. The characters that prowl around the city, flaunting money as result of their links to the illegal gold trade from the Democratic Republic of Congo, would comfortably fit in a Martin Scorsese movie script.

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Suffocating Congo’s War – by John Prendergast, Sasha Lezhnev and Lauren Wolfe (Foreign Policy – February 7, 2015)

http://foreignpolicy.com/

Rules imposed by Dodd-Frank are cutting off a critical source of funding for armed groups that have plagued the country for more than 20 years.

In a critique on the campaign to end the trade in conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Foreign Policy contributor Lauren Wolfe asserts that three main arguments used by the campaign are myths. Over a decade of independent research by the United Nations, Congolese research bodies, and NGOs, as well as key leaders of Congolese civil society, however, reveal critical evidence on why work on conflict minerals is one important part of the solution in eastern Congo.

In its assessment of the impact of the Dodd-Frank legislation on conflict minerals, the article misses the larger picture of the deadly conflict in eastern Congo and ignores many important voices of Congolese civil society.

[Editor’s note: A response from Lauren Wolfe can be found at the end of this article.]

Alleged myth: Armed groups control and rely on most of Congo’s mines, and Dodd-Frank has helped to counteract them.

Fact: Armed groups and their backers have profited heavily from minerals in eastern Congo, and Dodd-Frank Section 1502 is starting to transform that. But there is still a long way to go.

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How Dodd-Frank Is Failing Congo – by Lauren Wolfe (Foreign Policy – February 2, 2015)

https://foreignpolicy.com/

The campaign to stop conflict minerals is supposed to be protecting people’s lives in one of the most fragile parts of Africa. In fact, it seems to be doing the opposite.

Minerals are ruining lives. For several years now, in conversations about conflict and crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this has been a common refrain.

About $24 trillion worth of gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten are estimated to be in Congo’s eastern hills. They are dug from the fertile, brown mud there through exploitation: Kilos upon kilos of rocks and water are lifted and filtered each day for a few dollars per laborer. Minerals are smuggled, too, and help to line the pockets of the security guards, militias, and Congolese soldiers who lord over mining sites, wielding weapons and perpetrating sexualized violence against women.

By extension, the advocacy message goes, the “conflict minerals” from Congo that wind up in devices like iPhones cause rape. U.S. electronics and other expensive, shiny things fuel war. Individuals and companies must not buy dirty minerals, because exposing and cleaning up supply chains will reduce the stranglehold armed groups have on Congo’s mines.

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Prosecuting natural resource theft could help end conflicts: report – by Kieran Guilbert (Reuters U.S. – January 22, 2015)

 http://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Prosecuting commanders and kingpins of militant groups for trafficking natural resources in conflict zones could help end the world’s worst resource-driven violence, according to a report.

Despite widespread resource-driven conflict, individuals and companies are rarely prosecuted for the war crime of pillage, which is punishable at the International Criminal Court (ICC), said the Enough Project, a policy group fighting to prevent genocide and atrocities.

The pillaging of minerals was particularly destabilizing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it said, placing civilians under threat of violence and providing lucrative incomes to rebels, Congolese army factions, and businesses.

Lawyers in Congo said identifying ownership of natural resources, showing links between those accused of pillage and the derived wealth, and proving that armed conflict facilitated theft were major challenges to putting forward a strong case.

The report said prosecutions could help reduce incomes for perpetrators of atrocities, combat resource exploitation, and end the impunity that enables illegal financial networks to thrive in conflict zones and allows other crimes to continue.

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Grand Theft on a Global Scale: Prosecuting the War Crime of Pillage – – by Holly Dranginis (Enough Project.org – January 22, 2015)

http://www.enoughproject.org/

Click here for report: http://www.enoughproject.org/files/GrandTheftGlobal-PillageReport-Dranginis-Enough-Jan2015.pdf

In Enough Project Policy Analyst Holly Dranginis’ latest report, Grand Theft Global: Prosecuting the War Crime of Natural Resource Pillage in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dranginis provides an inside look at why the widespread theft of minerals in Congo has gone on unpunished, and how policymakers and legal practitioners can help advance cases. Grand Theft Global is the result of research in Congo, The Hague, and Washington, DC, including dozens of interviews with Congolese attorneys, international prosecutors, and local communities affected by pillage and the violence it enables.

Underneath the forests, hills, and rivers of the Democratic Republic of the Congo lie billions of dollars in mineral wealth, with millions of that being traded illegally through sophisticated criminal networks. Every year, those resources are stolen and traded for lucrative profits by some of the world’s worst criminals and their allies, including rebel leaders and state army commanders. This large-scale theft enables violent war crimes and crimes against humanity, and it constitutes a war crime in its own right, called pillage.

Yet, it’s not being prosecuted by courts in the Congo or on the world stage. Notorious groups like the FDLR, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and Seleka have been linked to natural resource theft in the central African region. They steal and trade elephant ivory, charcoal, gold, and other minerals to buy guns, munitions, and supplies. Without prosecutions, warlords, middlemen, and corporations cashing in on Congo’s stolen resources have been free to operate and profit in a climate of impunity.

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Editorial How to cut militias off from gold and mineral mines in Congo (Los Angeles Times – December 15, 2014)

 http://www.latimes.com/

Few parts of the world have been more ravaged by war and violence over the last two decades than the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s been made possible, in part, by the mines in the eastern part of the country that offer up tin, tungsten and tantalum — the 3Ts, as they’re known — and gold. Over the years, many of the mines have been commandeered or controlled by armed militias and the profits used to fund the continued violence.

But recently, human rights groups have successfully pressured makers of consumer electronics and electronic parts, which rely on the 3Ts, to track the source of their minerals and refuse to buy from suppliers who buy from mines that help fund armed rebels. A provision in the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010, requires publicly traded companies to disclose if they have products containing minerals from Congo and what steps were taken to ascertain whether the ore came from tainted mines.

Together, these changes have dramatically shrunk the market for untraceable 3T conflict minerals, affecting prices and disrupting the supply chain. As a result, about 67% of tin, tantalum and tungsten mines in Congo are no longer in the control of armed militias, according to the Enough Project, a human rights group.

But demilitarizing the gold mines remains a challenge. Only a small fraction of the mined world’s gold comes from Congo — about 1%. But 98% of the artisanally mined gold in Congo is smuggled out of the country and much of that benefits armed groups, according to the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Central African Republic new ‘blood diamond’ hub – by Martin Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – November 18, 2014)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The dysfunctional Central African Republic (CAR) has taken over as the country where “blood diamond” activity is again rife.

Diamonds worth $24-million have been smuggled out of CAR since the suspension of the Kimberley Process last year and Seleka rebels and “anti-balaka” militia are providing security to local diamond traders, who initially pay the warring groups for safe access to diamond fields and then for ongoing protection during mining.

“It’s a classical case of blood diamonds,” International Crisis Group project director Thierry Vircoulon told Mining Weekly Online in the attached video.

Belgian authorities earlier this year confiscated diamonds ostensibly smuggled through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Dubai to Europe from the ungoverned CAR, which is currently hobbling along as an impoverished failed State.

The chairperson of the Kimberley Process has put in a written request to the United Nations Security Council to alert neighbouring countries to the presence of diamond contraband.

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