At a time when pornography is flooding the internet, when sex is invading people’s minds and society to the point that the sex trade is becoming a huge industry, the time has come to liberalize prostitution, as powerful “progressive” lobbies are advocating. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) is publishing a new report denouncing the actions of the lobby for the liberalization of prostitution in Europe.

If the powerful “progressive” lobby is to be believed, the legalization of prostitution is the new horizon of human rights, the new right for women to conquer. After the legalization of abortion, transsexualism, surrogacy and euthanasia, it is now the turn of prostitution to be elevated to the status of a fundamental right in the name of the sacrosanct right to control one’s own body. This right knows no limits and the logic of the progress of human rights is implacable. To achieve this goal, the prostitution liberalization lobby prioritizes the use of supranational bodies to impose on States the idea that “sex work is work like any other”.

A lobby that has even reached the UN

The prostitution lobby relies on large NGOs, particularly those revolving around George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), which subsidizes them. They act through publications and fabricated strategic litigations. These NGOs include Amnesty International, Médecins du Monde, Human Rights Watch and many others, all of which are active in favor of “sex work”, such as the Red Umbrella Fund, which was itself created through the Open Society in 2012.

In 2024, this lobby took the Council of Europe by storm, fortunately to no avail. Several of these NGOs organized and supported the application of 261 prostituted persons asking the European Court of Human Rights to condemn France for its abolitionist approach which, broadly speaking, criminalizes the purchase of sexual acts in addition to pimping. In the fall of 2024, they were once again the ones who almost led the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to adopt a resolution promoting the extreme liberalization of prostitution. The ECLJ had mobilized strongly to block this in the name of women’s rights. A forthcoming target of this lobby seems to be the French Parliament, where a bill bearing its “trademark” was tabled in October 2024.

The battle for the liberalization of prostitution is being waged all the way to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. Tlaleng Mofokeng, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, known for her extremism on abortion and drugs, also echoes the rhetoric of the prostitution lobby: “sex work” is a job like any other, carried out by people who are most often consenting but stigmatized by all forms of criminalization of the activity. Unsurprisingly, she received USD 200,000 from the OSF in 2020. On the other side, courageously and at the cost of harassment, Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, opposes surrogacy and transgender mania and promotes the abolition of prostitution on the basis of testimonies from numerous victims, objective data and international law according to which this practice in itself violates human dignity.

The prostitution lobby, women’s benefactor?

Under the guise of the right to control one’s own body, the empowerment of women or the fight against discrimination against them, this lobby promotes the violation of women’s rights. Calling the activity of prostitution “sex work” or contrasting forced prostitution with voluntary prostitution to make the latter acceptable is a delusion: it is always about the purchase of a person’s body. It is also wrong to say that prostitutes are, with few exceptions, consenting, since it is established that prostitution is largely exploited by traffickers and almost systematically coerced by violence, manipulation, poverty or drugs, as is the case for 70% of prostitutes in the Netherlands according to the European Parliament. Prostitution also mainly affects poor women of foreign origin. According to the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (ESEC), 70% of people in prostitution in Europe in 2023 were migrant women, a figure that rose to 80% in France. Prostitution also affects more and more minors: some 12,000 in France according to the government.

Far from improving the situation of prostituted persons, which is the stated objective of those who promote the legalization of prostitution, it would mainly have the advantage of freeing up an economic market from which more and more profits can be legally made thanks to women’s bodies. According to the International Labor Organization, sexual exploitation already generates more than 170 billion dollars a year. The same pseudo-feminist arguments also underlie the liberalization of surrogacy and the trivialization of pornography, particularly among young people. In all these cases, the economic potential is immense and is based on an ultra-liberal conception of human beings, transforming women’s bodies and their sexuality into commodities available for rent.

Uberization of prostitution: women and girls in danger

Is liberalizing prostitution a good thing, as its advocates claim? On the contrary, it tends to encourage its uberization. It is no coincidence that the supply and demand for prostitution are much higher in liberal countries than in those promoting abolitionist policies. In 2016, the proportion of the population involved in prostitution was 36 times higher in Germany than in Sweden, where the demand for prostitution also fell from 13.6% to 7.9% between 1995 and 2008.

Liberalizing prostitution is harmful to the people who are trapped in it, the majority of whom are women, because traffickers can thus take advantage of a favorable legal environment that allows them to hide behind legal structures. The opacity of the milieu, human trafficking and violence not only do not decrease in liberal countries but are even said to increase tenfold, according to Europol. Conversely, abolitionist policies promote professional reintegration and assistance to persons in prostitution as victims with rights.

On the other hand, liberalizing prostitution would be devastating for young people, who would become real prey in a context of demoralization and hypersexualization, partly due to unprecedented exposure to pornography, itself a form of filmed prostitution. For them, prostitution has become commonplace, even glamorous, becoming synonymous with easy money and self-fulfillment. Reem Alsalem notes that it is affecting younger and younger girls, some as young as 8 years old. For students, it has also become a way of coping with precariousness: among people in prostitution, the proportion of those under 25 is said to have risen from 8% to 24% between 2019 and 2021.

Behind the apparently laudable objective of defending the rights of people in prostitution, liberalizing this practice amounts to legalizing the exploitation of which they are victims and regulating the violence of prostitution. “True” feminism in the service of the rights of women and girls lies in the fight against the commodification of women’s bodies.