The European Parliament has further beefed up the Commission’s proposal on new rules to prevent profits from trading minerals being used to fund armed conflicts around the world. In a vote in plenary, on 20 May, MEPs adopted a last-minute amendment drawn up by Louis Michel (ALDE, Belgium) that obliges downstream companies involved in the production and trade of minerals, known as 3TG (tin, tantalum and tungsten, their ores, and gold), to follow strict transparency rules.
Earlier, due to a…
Minerals: French Socialists claim victory
"This is a major success in the fight against the financing of conflicts in mining regions. It represents an historic breakthrough," announced the 13 French members of the S&D group. The achievement is not quite that decisive, however: by postponing the final vote on the report to a later date and entering into three-way talks without having built a consensus on the report, the European Parliament failed to dispel the fears voiced by Edouard Martin, spokesman for the French Socialists. "The European Parliament cannot award the Sakharov Prize to Doctor Mukwege, who moved the chamber to tears with his stories of the human misery being inflicted by armed groups financed by these conflict minerals and at the same time ignore the issue by considering that competitiveness takes precedence over human lives," he declared ahead of the votes in plenary. "This is a cynical irony," added Martin, who is up in arms against Medef, the French employers' organisation. On the eve of the vote, Medef stated that "extending the scope of the regulation to downstream players would be ineffective, inapplicable, unreliable […] and, for small companies, would lead to disproportionate costs relative to expected results".
