Author: GEN

The UN Forum on Business and Human Rights

From 26-28^thof November 2018, the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights was held in Geneva. The Forum is the world’s largest annual gathering on business and human rights with more than 2,000 participants from government, business, community groups and civil society, law firms, investor organizations, UN bodies, national human rights institutions, trade unions, academia and the media [1].… Read More

While writing about the ‘indigenous people’, one can easily fall into the trap of romanticisation and homogenisation. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues describes the indigenous people as “the holders of unique languages, knowledge systems and beliefs and possess invaluable knowledge of practices for the sustainable management of natural resources”.… Read More

This movie is about the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform and the oil spill that happened in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana. The whole movie revolves around the events occurred before the explosion and around the moment of the explosion itself, which is good because it gives the spectator an idea of how the oil industry works and of how the different actors relate to each other.… Read More

Synthetic diamonds are chemically, physically and optically identical to earth-mined diamonds, but they are man-made with the use of advanced technology. There are two key methods for making synthetic diamonds, High-Pressure-High Temperature (HPHT) process and Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD).… Read More

De Beers company, the diamond pioneer that has operated mines from the Arctic to South Africa, which has convinced the world that “a diamond is forever” and strongly believed that only mined diamonds are real and rare, is now getting into the lab-created diamond business.… Read More

“The Dongria Kondh tribe inspired millions when they won a ‘David and Goliath’ battle against mining giant Vedanta” (Survival International)

Huge mining production sites are set up and operated by a large corporation on a global scale.… Read More

“Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it.” – Jair Bolsonaro

President elect Bolsonaro in Brazil has promised to roll back environmental protections and indigenous rights in order to harvest the natural resources within the Amazon.… Read More

In the 1947, De Beers created the slogan, “A diamond is forever” (De Beers Group 2018). Little did they expect that several decades later, the same diamond could forever be a reminder of the atrocities of the diamond industry, in which conflict and violence were funded by the mines from which many of these diamonds had been harvested (Marr 2018).  … Read More