Obama Signs Legislation to Label Conflict Minerals

Last week, President Obama signed into law a huge victory for consumers and human rights advocates around the world: a provision requiring companies to label products made with minerals from Congo and the surrounding countries. The legislation promises to make it easier for consumers to choose products made without conflict minerals that support violence, rape, human trafficking, and other serious crimes.

The conflict minerals reporting provision is buried deep in the 2,300 page financial reform bill President Obama signed into law last week. It requires U.S. companies to publicly disclose what they are doing to prevent conflict minerals from being used to create their products, including everything from laptops to medical devices. Companies must report whether or not they source minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or nine surrounding states where Congolese minerals are often smuggled onto the international market. Companies who source from the region will be required to publish, on their website, what they are doing to prevent minerals whose sales fund human rights abuses like rape, slavery, and genocide from ending up in their products. If companies comply, it would be the first time consumers could look up the conflict mineral track record of thousands of companies with ease over the Internet.

Of course, the law doesn't ban the importation of conflict mineral-laden products or attempt to censure companies known to source from Congolese mines. And the law doesn't impose any penalties on companies who don't meet the reporting requirements. So there is a good chance products made with conflict minerals will continue to the sold in the U.S.

These conflict minerals include a number of minerals commonly used in the manufacture of electronics, including the three T's — tin, tungsten, and tantalum — as well as better-known minerals like gold. The proceeds from the mining of these minerals in the Congo have often funded militant groups responsible for mass killings, human trafficking, systematic rape, and other horrific abuses. However, complex supply chains and a lack of will on the part of some companies have made it incredibly challenging to determine how much conflict minerals are used in manufacturing and what companies use them. But the new reporting provision promises to be one of the biggest steps toward giving consumers accurate tools to help them choose conflict-free products.

Now that the financial reform bill and the conflict minerals reporting provision are law, the Securities and Exchange Commission will go to work on devising how best to implement these new regulations. They are supposed to come up with a strategy in the next nine months, during which the industry lobbyist groups that attempted to toss out the conflict minerals language from the bill will probably fight for minimal enforcement of the new regulations. But even if the corporations who benefit from the slavery and violence perpetuated by conflict minerals push for looser enforcement, consumers will soon have critical new information to help them make better choices for the Congolese people, the U.S., and themselves.

Photo credit: Phil Hawksworth