Responsible Jewellery Council appoints Iris Van der Veken as Executive Director
LONDON, April 9, 2019 – The Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC), the jewellery industry’s foremost standard setting and certification body, has appointed Iris Van der Veken as its next Executive Director.
A sustainability pioneer, with a career spanning the business and NGO sectors, Van der Veken has wide-ranging international experience in the diamond, gold, jewellery and fashion industries. Van der Veken is the first woman to become the organisation’s Executive Director and replaces Andrew Bone who was appointed in June 2015.
She worked extensively on the Alignment Assessment of industry programmes with the OECD minerals guidance and the development of awareness programmes on the UN’s Women Empowerment Principles (WEPs) in the UAE. Van der Veken was also a frontrunner in building partnerships in supply chain management and GRI reporting, chaired the Global Compact Network Belgium and initiated a forum on children’s rights and the role of business.
With more than 1,100 members spanning 73 countries, she will work with the board of directors and management team to ensure operational excellence throughout the RJC – benchmarking against some of the world’s leading accreditation bodies.
