Posted July 20, 2012 Page 43 is of particular interest. "RECOMMENDATIONS To ensure an effective, sustainable response to HIV that is consistent with human rights obligations: 3.2. Countries must reform their approach towards sex work. Rather than punishing consenting adults involved in sex work, countries must ensure safe working conditions and offer sex workers and their clients access to effective HIV and health services and commodities. Countries must: 3.2.1 Repeal laws that prohibit consenting adults to buy or sell sex, as well as laws that otherwise prohibit commercial sex, such as laws against “immoral” earnings, “living off the earnings” of prostitution and brothel-keeping. Complementary legal measures must be taken to ensure safe working conditions to sex workers. 3.2.2 Take all measures to stop police harassment and violence against sex workers. 3.2.3 Prohibit the mandatory HIV and STI testing of sex workers. 3.2.4 Ensure that the enforcement of anti-human-trafficking laws is carefully targeted to punish those who use force, dishonesty or coercion to procure people into commercial sex, or who abuse migrant sex workers through debt bondage, violence or by deprivation of liberty. Anti-human-trafficking laws must be used to prohibit sexual exploitation and they must not be used against adults involved in consensual sex work. 3.2.5 Enforce laws against all forms of child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation, clearly differentiating such crimes from consensual adult sex work. 3.2.6 Ensure that existing civil and administrative offences such as “loitering without purpose”, “public nuisance”, and “public morality” are not used to penalise sex workers and administrative laws such as “move on” powers are not used to harass sex workers. 3.2.7 Shut down all compulsory detention or “rehabilitation” centres for people involved in sex work or for children who have been sexually exploited. Instead, provide sex workers with evidence-based, voluntary, community empowerment services. Provide sexually exploited children with protection in safe and empowering family settings, selected based on the best interests of the child. 3.2.8 Repeal punitive conditions in official development assistance—such as the United States government’s PEPFAR anti-prostitution pledge and its current anti-trafficking regulations—that inhibit sex workers’ access to HIV services or their ability to form organisations in their own interests. 3.2.9 Take decisive action to review and reform relevant international law in line with the principles outlined above, including the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking In Persons, Especially Women And Children (2000)." (emphases added) Risks, Rights, and Health (July 2012) SECRETARIAT, GLOBAL COMMISSION ON HIV AND THE LAW UNDP, HIV/AIDS Group, Bureau for Development Policy 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted July 20, 2012 The UN finally says something that I can support! 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted July 21, 2012 This is first law I have ever agreed with & want to keep track of! Thanks for sharing:) 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted July 21, 2012 The UN finally says something that I can support! Agreed! The only thing prohibition of (fill in the blank) does is exclude (fill in the blank) from contributing to the tax coffers. Prohibition always accomplishes four things: Enables an unregulated untaxed market Creates a black market Invites organized crime Inflates the price of said good/service Yet always fails to keep us "safe" from the prohibited goods/services. Legislating morality sucks. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted July 28, 2012 Well, the US is usually the last country to follow anything sensible the UN suggests, so I wouldn't recommend getting too excited just yet 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted July 29, 2012 This is not a law, bill or anything else. It is just a AIDS report recommendation. The United states government hates adult consensual prostitution so much they will lie, cheat, and do anything to prevent it all around the world. The report states: TRAFFICKING IN MISCONCEPTIONS Sex work and sex traffi cking are not the same. The diff erence is that the former is consensual whereas the latter coercive. Sex worker organisations understand sex work as a contractual arrangement where sexual services are negotiated between consenting adults. Sex work is not always a desperate or irrational act; it is a realistic choice to sell sex—in order to support a family, an education or maybe a drug habit. It is an act of agency.172 By contrast, traffi cking in persons, as defi ned by international and local treaties, is “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefi ts to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation”.173 Such exploitation can include many forms of forced labour or slavery— in factories, fi elds, homes or brothels. Traffi cking for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation involves adults or children providing sexual services against their will, either through force or deception. A denial of agency, traffi cking violates their fundamental freedoms.174 Setting aside the question of whether people would choose sex work if they had better options, a point of view that casts “voluntary prostitution” as an oxymoron erases the dignity and autonomy of the sex worker in myriad ways. It turns selfdirected actors into victims in need of rescue. And yet some governments deploy anti-humantraffi cking laws so broadly as to confl ate consensual adult sex work with the exploitative, coerced traffi cking of people (primarily women and girls) for the purposes of sex.175 Indeed, negotiations in the writing of United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Traffi cking in Persons, Especially Women And Children (2000) were riven by disputes over these defi nitions. Some states and NGOs argued for the language to be amended to limit the law’s purview to people engaged in the international sex trade by force or coercion.176 This amendment was defeated on the grounds that no victim should have to prove that she did not consent, but the language now also implies that any person selling sex is so vulnerable that she is by defi nition unable to consent. The defi nition now explicitly states that the consent of the “victim” is irrelevant to the prosecution of the traffi cker.177 In part as a result of this overly broad defi nition, governments have cracked down, often violently, on sex workers or compelled them to undergo the same kinds of brutal “rehabilitation” in detention to which drug users are subjected. Forced to work clandestinely, sex workers cannot muster the collective power to improve their wages or working conditions, enjoy the 40 I HIV and the Law: Risks, Rights & Health protection of labour law or join together in trade unions or another organisation, whose benefi ts include access to public health care or the empowerment to establish health services run by sex workers themselves.179 International anti-human-traffi cking campaigns often promote the prohibition, either intentional or eff ective, of proven best practices in HIV prevention. For instance, crusaders in the United States have used the infl uence of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the primary vehicle of United States fi nancial support to AIDS-combating organisations around the world—to compel other governments to accept the confl ation of human traffi cking with sex work by conditioning the receipt of funds on the signing of its Anti-Prostitution Pledge.180 Maurice Middleberg, Vice-President of the Global Health Council, calls the pledge proof that the antihuman- traffi cking agenda is an anti-prostitution agenda. He points both to the pledge’s language—which calls prostitution “harmful and dehumanising” and links prostitution with human traffi cking—and the way the pledge has been put into practice.181 Although the pledge has been legally challenged in its application within the United States and was supposed to be reviewed by the Obama administration in early 2009, it remains in full force for organisations receiving funds under PEPFAR beyond the borders of the United States.182 WORKPLACE RIGHTS The International Labour Organization (ILO) has recommended that sex work be recognised as an occupation so that it can be regulated in ways that protect workers and customers.183 Sex workers in such a framework could exercise both individual and collective initiative in aff ecting their economic and social conditions. The ILO’s labour standard on HIV/AIDS, adopted in 2010, includes non-discriminatory access to health services and occupational safety for sex workers, including empowerment to insist on safe and protected paid sex in their workplaces.184 Decriminalisation is the fi rst step toward better working conditions—and with them, less HIV risk—and some jurisdictions have removed some penal provisions related to sex work. New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act (2003) decriminalised prostitution, opening the way for sex workers to operate in public and in safety.185 The New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective, brothel operators and the Labour Inspectorate have collaborated to develop workplace health and safety standards for sex work. Sex workers can bring employment discrimination complaints to the Human Rights Commission, and the Mediation Service on Employment adjudicates disputes.186 The police support sex workers in All organisations outside of the US receiving money under PEPFAR must sign the pledge. It reads, in part: “The U.S. Government is opposed to prostitution and related activities, which are inherently harmful and dehumanizing, and contribute to the phenomenon of traffi cking in persons. None of the funds made available under this agreement may be used to promote or advocate the legalisation or practice of prostitution or sex traffi cking.”178 The pledge puts grantees in an impossible bind. If they don’t sign, they are denied the funds they need to control and combat HIV. If they sign, recipient organisations are barred from supporting sex workers in taking control of their own lives—which is to say, their own health and that of their families and clients, including taking steps to avoid HIV and prevent its spread. PEPFAR’s Anti- 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites