Analysis: UN Rights Experts Take Side with Pimps Against Prostituted Women

By | January 4, 2024

NEW YORK, January 5 (C-Fam) The UN human rights office is aggressively moving forward with the full decriminalization of prostitution, including sidestepping UN protocols and procedures, the laws of the overwhelming majority of countries, and the UN General Assembly. Those who stand to benefit from such advocacy are traffickers and pimps, not sexually exploited women.

As previously reported in the Friday Fax, the UN human rights office reacted quickly to undermine a groundbreaking resolution of the EU parliament last Summer. The resolution called on all EU countries to criminalize sex buyers and pimps. It was a heavy blow to those who want prostitution to be fully decriminalized worldwide.

In a jerk reaction, the UN human rights office published a lengthy press communique taking a diametrically opposed position to the EU resolution. The UN rights office proposed “the full decriminalization of adult voluntary sex work from a human rights perspective”, including pimping, soliciting, and advertising prostitution. All legal restriction on prostitution lead to violations of human rights law according to the UN experts, this includes the laws of almost every country in the world.

Whereas the EU resolution described prostitution as inherently degrading, the UN experts called “sex work” a form of “legitimate work” and part of the human right to complete sexual and bodily autonomy.

The EU resolution acknowledged that women in prostitution overwhelmingly want to do something else with their lives and usually find themselves in prostitution because of crime, economic pressure or other forms of coercion. Because of this the EU report called on countries to develop “exit policies” to help women escape prostitution and be trained in other professions. The UN report also acknowledges that prostituted women are more often than not coerced, but rather than calling for exit strategies, the UN rights experts call for prostituted women to be able to form labor organizations.

The EU resolution calls on countries to aggressively prosecute human trafficking and to prosecute pimping specifically because prostituted women have to give up their profits to pimps and are usually left in subsistence living conditions. The UN experts instead call on countries not to be “overly aggressive” in policing sex trafficking in order to protect the ability of prostituted women and pimps to earn money.

The EU report moreover emphasizes the dangers to children from prostitution, violent pornography, and other forms of online grooming that fuel the market for prostitution. The UN report instead only mentions children once, when speaking of the need to protect prostituted women’s ability to earn money for their children.

The UN human rights office went out of its way to advocate these extreme views in reaction to the EU resolution. The UN report was initially published as an urgent communique for immediate release after the EU resolution was adopted in September 2023. It was not issued as an official UN document, as would normally be the case. It was then released as an official UN document in December with an apologetic note to explain that it was prepared in haste after the deadline for “standard publication date owing to circumstances beyond the submitter’s control.”

What remains unclear is why the UN human rights office is going out of its way to promote such extreme pro-prostitution views. Such views conflict with conventional legislation in most countries. Only New Zealand and the Belgium have adopted the full decriminalization model in recent years. Moreover, anti-trafficking scholars and advocates are overwhelmingly against such an approach because the evidence shows that sex trafficking increases wherever prostitution is legal. So, who stands to profit from the UN’s advocacy of prostitution?

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