Andrew Hunter chaired the symposium on Human Rights, HIV and Sex Work Policy and started by giving an overview on international sex work policies and tracked how extreme rightwing ideas have found their way into national and global sex work policies in the last eight years.

The next speaker, Gulnara Kurmanova from Kyrgyzstan spoke on the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and HIV showing how the 3 pillars proposed by the Note contradicted evidence and rejected recommendations from sex workers and sex worker activists to provide a framework that allowed different agencies to implement anti-sex worker strategies. A new version of the Guidance Note that was drafted by sex worker rights activists is still lying with the UNAIDS with no indication from them on whether the fist version will be rejected and the second one adopted. She demanded that UNAIDS constitutes an oversight body which included sex worker activists to watch over the process of finalization of the Note and include a nominated sex worker to the UNFPA team that will finalize the Note.   

This was followed by a short film on the impact of anti-trafficking law in Cambodia on sex workers lives and health. The film said sex workers in Cambodia were “caught between the tiger and the crocodile” as while possession of condoms was taken by the police as an evidence of sex work and therefore ground for arrest, a 2008 anti-trafficking law which UNICEF helped the government to draft, has now allowed police to close down brothels and force sex workers into rehabilitation centres from which they cannot escape without paying hefty bribes. In these rehabilitation centres HIV positive sex workers were also denied access to their regular ART. Both these oppressive approaches are justified by the UNAIDS Guidance Notes as it stands now.

Alejandra Gil from Mexico who spoke next made an important point that valuable HIV/AIDS funding should not be frittered away by supporting intermediary agencies to work with sex workers – all sex work interventions should be run by sex workers themselves.

Dorothy Aken Ova from Nigeria explained in her presentation how in many African countries governments are compelled under the influence of Northern donor countries to institute new anti-trafficking laws, which are actually creating conditions that make people more vulnerable to being trafficked.    

The next presentation by He-Jin Kim from South Korea, showed how in the four years since stringent trafficking prevention laws were implemented in the country, sex work has been driven completely underground and providing essential services to sex workers rendered impossible. The national HIV/AIDS programme no longer address sex workers as sex work do not legally exist in the country any longer. The presentation also pointed out that because of hostile media coverage and lack of support from women’s organizations, the organized protests by sex workers eventually petered out.

Meena Seshu from India concluded the session by saying that sex workers need a decriminalized space to work out their own solutions. She ended by reiterating a demand from a sex workers’ group in India – “Save us from our saviours”.