Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Kinshasa (Agenzia Fides) – Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Caritas in the United States, welcomes the approval by the U.S. Congress of the Law 111-203, whose Article 1502 establishes standards to prevent the marketing of minerals which support Congolese armed groups. This is what was declared by Jennifer Poidatz, representative of CRS in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during a news conference organized by the Congolese Bishops' Conference in Kinshasa to explain the position of the Church in Congo and the U.S. on the new law, which was signed by President Obama on July 21 (see Fides August 2-3, 2010).
The representative of the CRS explained the main points of Article 1502 of Law 111-203, for whose approval the American Catholic institution has been fighting.
The U.S. government, in collaboration with USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), must establish within six months a strategy for understanding the links among human rights violations, armed groups, and the extraction of minerals associated with conflicts and their commercial exploitation.
CRS hopes that "this strategy will reinforce the cooperation between the governments of the DRC, the U.S., and other actors, neighboring states, the international community, and the UN Panel on Congo." This collaboration, says the representative of the CRS, must lead to a number of objectives: to create a system to monitor and stop commercial activities that finance armed groups acting in the DRC, help to strengthen the system of government and economic institutions to improve transparency on the exploitation of minerals, and promote local and regional development.
The U.S. government should also draw up a plan to help companies work in compliance with the law by publishing, by the State Department, a "Charter of minerals associated with conflicts," which will be updated every six months.
U.S. firms that are registered with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) must disclose whether they use minerals that are naturally present in conflict areas of the DRC or in neighboring countries. In this case, they should send the SEC a report on the measures they implemented to establish the origin and traceability of these minerals, an independent review of this report, and a description of components that contain minerals associated with conflicts in the country, and, if possible, the mine of origin of mineral.
Lastly, the “DRC Conflict Free” label will be introduced, to certify products that do not use mineral whose proceeds fund the Congolese armed groups. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides 08/04/2010)
