Page 4014 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 25 November 2014
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visit Sweden. I considered a study of Swedish laws and the consideration of their applicability to Australia and the ACT in the areas of both prostitution and trafficking as unfinished business.
Earlier this year or late last year when I started to think about this tour I became aware that, in addition to the Swedish and what is now known as the Nordic laws, the French National Assembly had passed similar laws in December. Along with events in England, especially the publication of the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade, they provided opportunities for us to learn from the experiences of other legislators and policymakers about developments in those countries.
As news of our study travel spread, we were joined by other members. Eventually five members of state parliaments and various members of NGOs travelled together and separately to four different countries, looking at innovations in the way that the law and society deal with prostituted and trafficked persons. I visited Paris, Stockholm and London, and I want to use this time to reflect on those visits.
In the week beginning 14 April the group of legislators met with senior bureaucrats, legislators and NGOs in Paris. The people we met included Maud Olivier, a Socialist member of the National Assembly who was the leader of a group who navigated the legislation that adopted the Swedish laws through the National Assembly. We also met senior bureaucrats from the social cohesion directorate of the ministry of women and the inter-ministerial task force for protecting women victims of violence and the fight against human trafficking—thankfully called MIPROF—which coordinates the collection, analysis and retrieval of useful data on violence against women and has been charged with forming partnerships with NGOs and local authorities to develop local initiatives to meet the needs of victims of violence against women. It will be responsible for defining and coordinating the implementation of plans of action against trafficking in human beings and the implementation of France’s new prostitution laws when they pass the Senate, which is expected to happen quite soon.
We also met a number of NGO organisations, including the Mouvement du Nid, one of many abolitionist NGOs in France. It trains over 3,000 social workers per year dealing with prostitution issues as well as training lawyers, judges, police, teachers and nurses working in inner city schools.
We also met representatives of Scelles Foundation, which is a clearing house for abolitionist literature and which looks at the state of prostitution across the world, and representatives of Medecins du Monde, a broad-based group of doctors and volunteers who work in 15 countries. While Medecins du Monde welcomed the social programs associated with the new laws, they were particularly and highly critical of the proposed criminalisation of the buyers of sex and people living off the proceeds of prostitution.
France is a country which considers itself abolitionist. It draws its motivation for this from its 1960 ratification of the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons, which says in its preamble:
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