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July 2012 UN Development Program report recommends decriminalization of prostitution

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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

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This is first law I have ever agreed with & want to keep track of! Thanks for sharing:)

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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.

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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 ;)

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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-

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