Past event summary

About the event

The UAE Kimberley Process Chair (KP Chair), Ahmed Bin Sulayem and the UAE Ministry of Economy, hosted the annual plenary event of the global initiative in Dubai last November 13 – 17 at The Westin Al Habtoor. Participants representing 81 countries met to discuss a number of issues vital to the future of the KP and stakeholders of the diamond supply chain across the world.

The week-long event featured addresses from His Excellency Abdullah Al Saleh, Undersecretary for Foreign Trade & Industry at the UAE Ministry of Economy; Ahmed Bin Sulayem, UAE Kimberley Process Chair; and Andrey Polyakov, President of the World Diamond Council. It concluded the handover process to the representatives of the Australian government for the 2017 KP Chairmanship.

During the course of the past ten months as KP Chair for 2016, the UAE has proposed a number of initiatives and historic proposals aimed at strengthening the KP mandate, as well as focusing on the beneficiation of Africa as to ensure producing countries on the continent receive their fair share from the diamond trade.

Among these issues, the plenary also focused on rough diamond valuation and addressing the growing synthetic diamond industry. Over the past year, the UAE KP Chair has enacted a number of directives, seeing him move away from the traditional approach to take on a more hands-on role. In addition to beginning the process of bringing Venezuela back into the fold, through the ‘Africa Initiative’ there has been significant progress made in engaging governments across the continent. Mr. Bin Sulayem has held successful meetings with CAR, Angola, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and Lesotho.

The Plenary also featured a series of workshops for members of the KP, in addition to presentations on the roadmap to implementing Blockchain technology, which will be further explored in one of the KP working groups next year. A new KP website was also presented, developed by the UAE, which will be launched before the end of the year.