Note: This op-ed originally appeared in the U.S. News and World Report and was written by former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Steve Feldstein and Enough Project's Associate Director of Policy, Sasha Lezhnev.
It was not long ago that central Africa was mired in its "first world war" that led to 5.4 million deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Slowly and painstakingly, conflict-affected areas have started to recover. But peace is fragile, and a reversion to widespread violence is never a far-off prospect.
A small provision in U.S. law that has had an outsized effect in the Congo and has diminished the ability of armed groups to raise revenue is Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, otherwise known as the conflict minerals law. This provision mandates that corporations are responsible for reporting on their supply chains such that they disclose whether or not they are buying minerals from armed groups, which have reaped enormous profits from these sales…
Read the full op-ed in US News.