"ITSCI is unwilling to address failures of its due diligence scheme - companies must now pressure it to take strong action", 4 November 2022

In April 2022 we 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. In its public response ITSCI fails to adequately address any of the problems raised or necessary reforms.

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.

Instead of seizing the opportunity for self-critical reflection and seriously dealing with the allegations, ITSCI has published an aggressive response denying all allegations, often based on unsubstantial or poorly evidenced arguments, while leaving key questions unanswered. Its response contains many misleading and incorrect statements as well as crude misrepresentations of our claims.

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.

Our main allegations remain uncontradicted by ITSCI’s response. In the attached statement we reiterate the importance of our main findings and show that ITSCI fails to contest them...