United Nations Economic and Social Council
Commission on Human Rights
Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and protection of Minorities
Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery
22nd Session
Geneva, June 1997
Human and labour rights violations in the sex industry
For the past year Anti-Slavery International has been working on a project exploring ways of preventing human rights violations and other abuses against prostitutes (sex workers). The project has involved investigating the wide range of abuses to which sex workers are subjected and focused on six countries in particular: Brazil, Ghana, Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom, which have been visited by our Project Officer.

The project revealed that, rather than facing slavery, most women working as prostitutes are subjected to abuses which are similar in nature to those experienced by other women working in low status jobs in the informal sector. Their predicament is made much worse, however, by the stigma and criminal charges widely attached to prostitution, which allow police and other officials to harass them without ever intervening to uphold their most elementary rights.

This means that even in the many countries where prostitution itself is not illegal, sex workers cannot secure the minimum basic standards which other workers have acquired as far as conditions of work or their personal safety are concerned. It also means that the police frequently fail to take action to help the significant minority among prostitutes who really are victims of slavery.

In the course of the project, Anti-Slavery investigated whether international human rights and labour standards are applicable to problems experienced by sex workers in general. We found that many of the standards agreed by the United Nations and the International Labour Organization over the past 75 years could be invoked to prevent abuses against sex workers.

We have concluded that sex workers face systematic discrimination and are therefore at risk of a variety of abuses. These include police extortion and arbitrary detention, and other violations of sex workers' human and labour rights which in some cases even amount to slavery, especially resulting from debt bondage or child servitude under Article 1, sections (a) and (d), of the 1956 Supplementary Convention on Slavery.

The conclusions of our forthcoming report will include a recommendation that all national legislation which, in intent or in practice, results in the placing of sex workers outside the scope of the rule of law, should be repealed. No category of human beings should be denied their basic human rights.