ITSCI is Unwilling to Address Failures of its Due Diligence Scheme - Companies Must Now Pressure it to Take Strong Action

Nov 4, 2022 | Global Witness
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In April 2022 Global Witness published the detailed report The ITSCI laundromat - How a due diligence scheme appears to launder conflict minerals, uncovering the serious failures of the ITSCI traceability and due diligence scheme in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Global Witness has documented that in two major mining areas in South Kivu around 90% and 80% of ITSCI-tagged 3T minerals respectively came from illicit sources in Q1 of 2021. 

ITSCI aims to avoid conflict financing and human rights abuses for tin, tantalum and tungsten supply chains, collectively known as 3T minerals. However, large amounts of minerals connected to armed conflict and child labour, as well as smuggled or trafficked minerals have been laundered through ITSCI’s supply chains, evidence suggests. It seems that ITSCI has turned a blind eye to these issues, that its controls don’t work and that its incident system is flawed, downplaying or ignoring incidents.

ITSCI’s aggressive approach to any criticism is very disappointing but not new. In 2020 it tried to suppress critical information in a research paper of a postgraduate student at the university of Antwerp about ITSCI’s Rwanda programme by threatening to sue their university and request damages.