The Responsible Jewellery Council now has the ability to vote on the expulsion of members that bring the organisation into disrepute.
The RJC’s inability to remove Russian diamond miner Alrosa following the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 led to the departure of several prominent members of the organisation.
Alrosa eventually suspended itself from the RJC in April; however, by then companies such as Richemont, Pandora, Kering, Cartier, and Watches of Switzerland had already resigned.
RJC executive director Melanie Grant said that the organisation has learned a great deal from the incident.
“If members bring us into disrepute, we can vote as a board and expel them,” she told the Rapaport Diamond Podcast.
“We didn’t have the ability to do that before in the way that would have needed to have been done at the time. So we had to change our articles and then we had to change our membership agreement.”
While many of these members would later rejoin the RJC, Grant added that 11 of those that departed in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine have not returned.
Grant was appointed executive director in January.
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