By Janet Duran
At the United Nations, experts are assigned to review priority areas in the field of human rights and report back. These independent experts are called “special rapporteurs.” This month Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, requested information from organizations globally on the issue of violence and its impact on the right to health. Tlaleng Mofokeng will also focus on the “impact of the criminalization of sex work, same sex relations, transgender persons, abortion, drug use etc. on the enjoyment of the right to health.” Desiree Alliance and BPPP filled in the Special Rapporteur’s questionnaire.
BPPP contributed in the opening question that arresting sex workers (and people profiled as sex workers) is in and of itself violence. The United Nations must understand that it is not just that some policing and arrest of of sex workers that rises to the level of violating rights, but that every act of policing and/or arrest is a rights violation. Desiree Alliance contributed, among many other elements, information about the extensive collateral consequences of this policing, arrest, incarceration and criminalization on the right to health. Desiree Alliance also analyzed the global impact of US HIV/AIDS policy and the “Nordic Model” on sex workers’ right to health.
Both of our organizations would also like to thank New Jersey Red Umbrella Alliance, The Outlaw Project, the Black Sex Worker Collective and many other advocates who contributed to our thinking on these issues via the recent Universal Periodic Review process (2019 – 2021). We will share other groups’ contributions to this process as we receive them.