YES!! Very much admire the work that ESPLERP is doing, Maxine. Best wishes!

Thanks for your reply – is this Emma? Just guessing from New School and Red Umbrellas – very excited to see that we are growing as a movement, due to a lot of the organising around HIV/AIDS and the IAC last summer. The statements supporting decriminalisation from WHO, Human Rights Watch, UNAIDS, and other international human rights organisations do contribute a lot of legitimacy and momentum to our cause, especially as the moral panic of human trafficking research is increasingly shown to be problematic, when the biggest trafficking investigation in history in the UK failed to find any evidence for it; and opinion from feminist and other social movements also seem increasingly sympathetic to what sex worker activists have long been saying for decades.

I think the international sex worker movement is using better organising strategies every year to accomplish a lot more with little to no funding, which is great. It’s an exciting time to get involved and make things better.

Very true, Peter – we have yet to see how this may be used against us.

An article worth reading:
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/why_did_john_roberts_rule_for_sex_workers/singleton/

Well-put, Wendy – the U.S. has signed but not ratified the ICESR, one of the two original core human rights conventions, which as I understand it, is what contains the Right to Health – which is a shame. President Jimmy Carter signed ICESR, but it didn’t pass through the Senate. Carter has also signed, but not ratified, CEDAW, another convention that could be instrumental to addressing violence against sex workers. Furthermore, we have neither signed or ratified the Migrant Worker Convention, and we are not part of the International Criminal Court.

Even for conventions in which American NGO’s have originally done a lot of work in helping to create, it is challenging to get the U.S. legislature to recognize otherwise self-executing treaties. The rationalization for this, according to constitutional scholars, is because doing so would violate the separation of powers, namely the judiciary and the Congress – under Article III, only the judiciary has the right to apply treaty law to cases before the court; Congress also often contends that certain human rights conventions don’t add anything to U.S. domestic law’s human rights provisions.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the other original core human rights convention, was ratified with many reservations, after more than two decades of inaction. I agree that it is really a shame that the U.S. is not more active in human rights – where it could have taken the momentum of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and even 9/11 to take greater leadership in defending human rights globally, it has instead made a travesty of its own human rights record and contributed to the weakening of international human rights instruments.

Really, a Shame.

Brokett – thank you for your correction. I’ve notified the editor.