U.S. State Dept may come down hard on jewellery origin rules

Early this week, U.S. State Department officials in a meeting in NYC said that jewellery businesses must declare the origins of all the materials used in making jewellery, failing which they will be subject to new regulations.

 Talks about implementing new regulations regarding declaring origins of jewellery materials have been going for sometime now but none have been taken seriously – but according to reports, this time, the discussion seemed far more serious. This initiative is now directly under the purview of the White House, according to sources.

 The rules if implemented will cover any and all raw materials used to create jewellery including colour gemstones, diamonds, gold and other metals and also discussed in the meeting was how the rule will include a possible declaration of chain of custody, i.e., jewellery moving from owner to owner.

 In the past, implementing such rules have been in vain considering determining the provenance of every part of a jewellery item has been very difficult. The State Department apparently has not been very happy with this - the takeaway from the discussion was that customers have every right to know where their gemstones and jewels are coming from.

 Kimberley Process was deemed insufficient as it fails to expand its definition of conflict diamonds – so a new way of finding out the origin of stones is in order. The motivation behind this initiative is to track down and implicate “maligned regimes”.