Sex workers celebrate and protest on the 10th Annual Sex Workers Rights dayPhoto: Notchesblog.com
PARIS — (New York Times) The question of what should be done about prostitution is as old as the profession itself, but the issue is now front and center again, as a leading human rights group proposes decriminalization, while some countries push toward harsher penalties for those who pay for sex.
In France, England and Ireland, lawmakers are considering new measures — and in the cases of Northern Ireland and Canada, are enforcing new laws — that decriminalize prostitution, but impose penalties on clients, using a model adopted in Sweden in 1999.
But the effort to crack down on a largely male clientele while sheltering a mostly female work force is taking place just as the human rights group Amnesty International is advocating a new course: decriminalizing all sex work, both for buyers and sellers.
At an international conference next week in Dublin, about 500 Amnesty delegates from more than 80 countries will vote on whether to advocate the elimination of all penalties for sex work, on the grounds that it is a matter of privacy between consenting adults.
The proposal has been denounced by women’s groups like the New York-based Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, and celebrities like Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet and Gloria Steinem.
“Prostitution has always been considered a domestic matter and now Amnesty could elevate it to a point of international human rights law,” said Francis A. Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois and a former Amnesty board member in the United States. He called that development “significant.”
“But why is the resolution so broad?” he asked. “Everything should be organized around that basic principle of protecting the women and girls. We should be protecting human beings, and not sex work.”
In June, the French …Read More
Source:: PM Newspaper
