Brussels to host annual diamond meeting

The annual meeting of the Kimberley Process, the international initiative to fight conflict diamonds, will be hosted by the European Union (EU) in Brussels next week.

The EU is the current chair of the Process which brings together government, civil society and international organisations from over 70 participating countries.

The meeting comes at a time when Belgian prosecutors are investigating suspected trading in conflict or blood diamonds through Europe's diamond capital of Antwerp.

Since the establishment of the Kimberley Process in 2002, the amount of diamonds on the world market that were mined in a war zone and sold to finance further conflict have dropped from 15 to less than 1%.