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We urge States to heed the Working Group’s recommendations related to the realization of individual and collective rights to substantive equality, including guaranteeing the right to decent work, comprehensive social protection, and repealing laws criminalizing poverty. International and regional economic, financial and monetary institutions and their member States must move away from the growth-centered and neoliberal paradigm that are root causes of inequalities.

Economic violence against women and girls, as with many other forms of gender-based violence, is rooted in patriarchal, racist, classist systems of oppression. In the last decades, structural conditions created by global capitalism and neoliberal policies, combined with those first mentioned, have added new dimensions, causes and consequences.

We support the Special Rapporteur’s recommendations to States to move away from criminal approaches to drug use and control frameworks and rather adopt an evidence-based, human rights approach. Moreover, access to medicines is a human right that must not be impeded by policies that favour corporate interests over people’s health and rights.

In collaboration with the Global Network of Sex Work Project, SRI supported a delegation of sex workers from different countries to participate in the 56th session of the Human Rights Council. This delegation also benefited from the support of the Count me In! Consortium and the Our Voices, Our Future Consortium.

Evidence collected over 25 years by Amnesty International in Norway and Ireland, Médecins du Monde in France has consistently demonstrated that criminalisation as recommended by the SR VAW, has been responsible for increasing the economic vulnerability, worsening the quality of life of sex workers everywhere this system is implemented.

As a mother, I am offended by the report’s assertion that sex workers are bad mothers and our children are a result of violence who will end up getting stolen, trafficked, raped and killed. I have chosen sex work to be my profession, but this is not my whole reality. Before I am a sex worker, I am many things. My rights should not be denied because of my job.

As a sex worker and sex worker advocate, I and my community find this report problematic and harmful. As a feminist, I object to the report because it denies our agency and autonomy.

a mayor violencia que sufrimos las personas trabajadoras sexuales está basada en el estigma, la discriminación y la persecución policial. Necesitamos que se reconozca el trabajo sexual como lo que es: un trabajo.

The greatest violence we sex workers suffer is based on stigma, discrimination, and police persecution. We need sex work to be recognized as what it is: a job.

La première des violences est qu’on refuse d’entendre nos voix et qu’on impose des jugements moraux contre nous. Nos voix en tant que travailleuses du sexe doivent être entendues. Pour nous protéger de la violence, nous avons besoin du droit du travail, de la reconnaissance du travail sexuel comme un travail, et du respect de nos choix en tant que travailleuses du sexe.