An absence of “political support” led the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to vote in favour earlier this month of returning a controversial resolution to decriminalize prostitution as a normalized occupation of “sex work” back to the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination. The move has been hailed as a “milestone victory” by the The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ).
Before the vote, the ECLJ expressed public concern concerning the report and motion for the resolution on prostitution entitled: “Protecting the human rights and improving the lives of sex staff and victims of sexual exploitation.”
At the assembly meeting, Mariia Mezentseva-Fedorenko, committee chairperson, reportedly asked for the papers to be returned for “discussions, work and deliberations.”
Support for the primary iteration of the document looked to bolster a view that prostitutes make a living of their very own free will – despite data clearly showing the bulk are coerced migrants, in keeping with the ECLJ.
This view had also been supported despite fierce opposition against the legalization of prostitution by Ms. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations (U.N.) Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women And Girls, as reported by Christian Daily International.
Alsalem told the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 56th session in June/July that “Prostitution is a system of exploitation and an aggregated type of male violence against women and girls that intersects with other types of structural discrimination.”
She also slammed the concept of state authorities legalizing prostitution, saying that States made profits from prostituted women in full legalized systems. In Switzerland, for instance, an annual revenue of three.2 billion CHF ($3.5 billion USD) had been generated by the business sex industry.
“States profit from the prostitution of girls through personal income tax imposed on them, the company taxing and licensing fees required on brothels and/or cyber enabled businesses, in essence becoming a pimp State,” said Alsalem.
Despite these comprehensive known concerns, the ECLJ, a Christian-based non governmental organization (NGO), believed that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was being pressurized by lobbyists to legalize prostitution, whatever the clear links with human trafficking, as evidenced by Alsalem.
“Behind the laudable objective of defending the rights of individuals in prostitution, this proposal in actual fact conceals the legalization of their exploitation and the regulation of the violence of prostitution,” claimed the ECLJ, in a public statement before the Oct. 3 vote.
“It is due to this fact essential that the members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe shoulder their responsibilities and firmly oppose the adoption of this one-sided Resolution, which is out of touch with the true plight of hundreds of ladies and men in Europe.”
If the proposal had been approved in its current form, all criminal sanctions can be abolished against clients and pimps, who would effectively turn into employers.
The ECLJ believed the present influential text for the assembly report had been compromised, setting out the terms of the problem by mainly promoting the normalization of prostitution as sex work.
The NGO identified the several approach, a “flagrant contradiction,” of the present document to the initial text for the talk entitled, “The reintegration of individuals trapped in prostitution and human trafficking survivors.”
“Over and above a change of title, it’s the protection of individuals in prostitution that’s turned the wrong way up: from a ‘trap’, prostitution is transformed into ‘work’, which ought to be normalized so as, supposedly, to enhance the lives of its victims,” stated the ECLJ.
The debate on abolitionism against decriminalization of sex work, as outlined in the present report, might have been constructive but accommodates an “all-out criticism of the abolitionist vision,” in keeping with the ECLJ, “which is presented as prejudicial, while the decriminalization of prostitution is applauded.”
Furthermore, international source texts utilized to construct the argument in favor of decriminalizing sex work, were presented as “exemplary” within the report for the talk, the ECLJ stated, and not using a balance because advocates for the abolition of prostitution “don’t appear to have been consulted.”
Alsalem’s report for the U.N. Human Rights Council “just isn’t even mentioned” within the text informing European parliamentarians for the talk. This compares to comments contained within the report by Tlaleng Mofokeng, UN Special Rapporteur on the correct to health, advocating the entire decriminalization of prostitution, added the ECLJ.
“The bias in favor of total decriminalization of prostitution is due to this fact obvious, although it’s a direct affront to human dignity,” stated the ECLJ.
Looking on the detail of the present committee report, the ECLJ highlighted other concerns with regard to international law. The proposal distinguished between forced prostitution and sex work, advocating for the normalization of the latter activity.
“However, this vision of prostitution as acceptable is solely ideological and inoperative in international law,” stated the ECLJ. “It is a denial of reality since it implies admitting the existence of legitimate prostitution: prostitution that’s fully chosen or freely consented to, which is incredibly rare. It has been established that prostitution is basically exploited by traffickers.”
The NGO referred to data showing a lot of known prostitutes within the European Union who’ve been coerced into the activity. These figures got here from the European Parliament itself in a resolution dated Sept. 14 last yr (2023), reporting 70 percent of the 30,000 prostitutes within the Netherlands being either manipulated into the activity by a 3rd party, akin to a “loverboy” or by straightforward violence.
For the European Union as an entire, 70 percent of prostitutes on the continent are migrant women and 51 percent of human trafficking victims within the EU are trafficked specifically for sex exploitation, the ECLJ stated. An extra reference was made to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) stating that USD 100 billion per yr is generated by men paying trafficked women for sex.
Even if trafficking just isn’t involved in prostitution, the ECLJ pointed to the vulnerability of prostitutes selling sex to stave off poverty.
“In fact, in cases that don’t involve trafficking in human beings, a one who prostitutes is on the very least pushed or forced into it by particular circumstances, akin to poverty, but at all times because she or he is responding to the request of a 3rd party. In any event, the law is evident on the query of consent: the consent of a victim of human trafficking to his or her own exploitation is irrelevant when it’s obtained by the offer or acceptance of payments or advantages.”
In its statement, the ECLJ outlined plenty of comments by the European Union and U.N., stating that the concept of prostitution violated human rights. For example, the Preamble to the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949) declares: “prostitution and the accompanying evil of the traffic in individuals for the aim of prostitution are incompatible with the dignity and value of the human person and endanger the welfare of the person, the family and the community.”
This statement, in keeping with the ECLJ, is predicated on the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), recognising “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the inspiration of freedom, justice and peace on the planet.”
“Whether or not it involves trafficking in human beings, prostitution by its very nature violates human dignity,” added the ECLJ. “From this viewpoint, it might be absurd for the PACE to adopt the current motion for a Resolution which calls on legislators ‘to be certain that sex staff may perform their activity in dignified conditions.’
“Similarly, prostitution can’t be regarded as ‘a vital risk factor for violence against women’: it’s in itself violence.”
The committee might be given one other six months to revise the report and the ECLJ called for the time for use to “modify the final thrust of the report and the motion for a resolution and to remove all factual untruths and legal approximations.”
“The ECLJ is not going to fail to follow the evolution of those texts: the protection of the dignity of individuals trapped in prostitution is at stake, as is the credibility of the PACE,” added the ECLJ.
