After more than a decade of successful collaboration, we, the members of the Fatal Transactions network, will end our cooperation as a network to continue our joint work on preventing conflicts around extractive industries within other structures. Our final Fatal Transactions newsletter provides more information about our decision, about new European networks and about the most important FT activities of the last ten years.

This website will stay online for another year, until February 2013, to allow interested readers access to information contained therein.

Communique of the KP Civil Society Coalition meeting in Brussels, 18-19 November 2011

You can download the pdf file here.

The Kimberley Process (KP) has thrown away its main point of leverage over the Zimbabwean government by allowing it to export diamonds from the controversial Marange region without first fulfilling previous commitments to reform its diamond trade, said the Kimberley Process Civil Society Coalition of NGOs today.
"The Kimberley Process has effectively given up on Zimbabwe," said Alfred Brownell, President of Green Advocates, Liberia. "KP member governments and the diamond industry seem ready to turn their back on the interests of Zimbabwe's citizens, the public good and the principles on which the Kimberley Process was founded."

As part of BICC´s engagement within the Kimberley Process, BICC, together with Heinrich Böll foundation organizes a round table discussion on the challenges arising from the situation in the Zimbabwean diamond sector.

See the invitation (pdf)

Today, the European Commission was to publish a new Communication challenges of future access to minerals and raw materials for its industry. The publication of the communication was surprisingly held back due to still ongoing negotiations among EU member states. The international campaign Fatal Transactions appeals to the European Commission to develop a strategy that will not be at the cost of the socio-economic development of raw materials exporting countries in Africa.

Download the full press release

Activist organisations today expressed a vote of no confidence in the Kimberley Process, and walked out of the scheme’s meeting in Kinshasa, in protest at its failure to address human rights abuses associated with the diamond trade.