Editor’s Note
This article highlights a critical transparency gap in the jewelry industry, where both consumers and major companies often lack knowledge about the origins of precious materials. As Human Rights Watch emphasizes, understanding the supply chain is a fundamental step toward ethical sourcing and accountability.
Do you know where the gold, diamonds, and other precious stones used to make jewelry come from? Not many consumers consider the human cost of their production or wonder about their origin. But what is most surprising is that many of the largest companies in the sector don’t either.
The New York-based human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) launched a social media campaign to raise awareness about this issue.
The campaign is already a year old, but this month, the organization launched the hashtag #BehindTheBling on social media to reinforce its efforts.
At the time this article was written, the hashtag #BehindtheBling had been used 20,000 times on Twitter since the initiative’s launch earlier this month.
Additionally, about 6,000 letters were sent to jewelry companies demanding full transparency about their sourcing practices.
It was easy to know which companies to target because HRW released an internal analysis of the sourcing practices of the 13 largest jewelry and watch brands.
The organization compared each company’s practices for sourcing gold and diamonds and ranked them according to specific criteria, including efforts to assess and respond to human rights risks, establish traceability, and publicly report on company actions.
The results showed that some companies took considerable actions to address the risks of human rights violations in their gold and diamond supply chains, but others did not.
Most of the companies studied by HRW do not have full traceability for the gold and diamonds they acquire nor do they analyze the human rights situation, and many of them did not even supply the names of their suppliers.
Clearly, none of the companies were classified as “excellent.”
Only Tiffany & Co. was considered “strong” for taking significant measures to achieve responsible sourcing, while Bulgari, Cartier, Pandora, and Signet were rated as “moderate,” and four others fell into the “weak” or “very weak” category.
HRW estimates that there are millions of people extracting gold or other gems on a small scale and in an artisanal manner. In many cases, the men, women, and children working in the mines are victims of human rights violations.
The latest data from HRW shows that there are more than one million children working in the mining industry worldwide, mostly in gold and precious stone extraction.
Many of the countries with extensive documentation on child labor are concentrated in West and Central Africa.
For example, in Sierra Leone, thousands of children and youth extract diamonds in exchange for a place to sleep, food, and work tools.
There are similar reports regarding Côte d’Ivoire, where children are victims of trafficking organizations and are brought to the country from neighboring Burkina Faso to extract gold artisanally.
HRW’s report on their situation describes living conditions similar to slavery.
Farai Maguwu doesn’t have to read about child abuse in African gold mines. As the executive director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, he has witnessed the horrors that many of these children endure.
The plight of child labor in mining is not just an African problem.
Myanmar (Burma) faced sanctions for putting rubies and other gems up for sale following allegations that the local mining industry used trafficked children. And reports of abuse have not ceased in that Asian country.
