Prostitutes Outraged at Conference Cancellation

By | 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C. May 15 (C-Fam) A human rights conference in Zambia was abruptly cancelled this week under pressure from the Chinese government. The action has sparked outrage from various NGOs that advocate for prostitution, abortion, and gender ideology.

Days before it was set to begin, Access Now, the organizer of RightsCon 2026 in Lusaka, Zambia, issued a statement urging participants not to travel, saying “we believe foreign interference is the reason RightsCon 2026 won’t proceed in Zambia or online.”

While the Zambian government expressed concern that some of the conference’s proposed themes were not in “full alignment with Zambia’s national values and broader public interest considerations,” the larger problem was that China objected to the participation of Taiwanese civil society groups. The previous RightsCon was held in 2025 in Taipei.

Amnesty International called the cancellation “a brazen act of Chinese transnational repression which must be resisted.”

While there is no indication that the participation of “sexual and reproductive health and rights” (SRHR) advocates factored into the Chinese government’s reasoning, the groups nevertheless expressed outrage at the loss of what they anticipated would be a valuable platform for their controversial issues.

“The agenda was also strategic,” said  Dr. Zahra Stardust. “In response to the coordinated, well-funded anti-rights movement currently agitating against SRHR, stakeholders sought to chart, track, and map their tactics.” Stardust is a “queer femme” scholar who studies “sex worker activism, LGBTQ+ health and criminalization” and sits on the World Health Organization’s World Health Organization’s Sexual Health and Wellbeing Advisory Group.

A spokesman for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) said: “spaces like RightsCon 2026 are critical for communities who are already pushed to the margins, including sex workers, LGBTQIA+ people, and those seeking sexual and reproductive healthcare.”  IPPF’s statement expressed concern that this happened “at a time of growing global rollback on fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, access to information, and [SRHR].”

Women on Web, an organization that ships abortion pills internationally in violation of national laws, recalled having “connected with activists around the world at RightsCon to support critical access to abortion information online,” calling the conference “an essential convening space” and stating that they “stand in full solidarity” with the organizers.

The European Sex Workers Alliance, a group that advocates for the decriminalization and normalization of prostitution, noted that before the conference organizer issued their statement, “many people in the queer and sex work community were distraught, believing that the conference was censored because of the content that they were set to present.”

The presence of so many abortion groups at RightsCon is not surprising given its organizers’ positions. Access Now has spoken out in favor of abortion as a right, condemning the overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.  A spokeswoman for the organization said the decision overturning Roe “didn’t only obliterate reliable access to abortion services for women and people who birth—and demolish any sense of agency we had over our own bodies—it threw the right to privacy of all people across the country into jeopardy.”

Access Now has also advocated against AI gender recognition, arguing that such technologies violate individuals’ rights to self-determine their own gender.

While the U.S. government has not made any statement about the cancellation, conference organizers said the embassy staff in Zambia were “helpful and responsive” when they contacted them.

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