GENEVA, Switzerland — The Sex Workers Rights Coalition recently addressed U.S. human rights violations at the United Nations, where the United States is currently under scrutiny from the UN's Universal Periodic Review.
The UPR is a United Nations mechanism that allows member states to review each other’s human rights interventions every five years based on treaties, conventions, and recommendations from previous review periods.
Participating member states gather input from civil society to make their assessments, and there is ongoing concern that the U.S. is ultimately failing to protect the human rights of vulnerable populations.
The Sex Workers Rights Coalition will send a delegation of community members and advocates to Geneva from June 22-28 to meet with representatives from UN member states who are willing to publicly support the rights of sex workers and transgender people in the U.S.
The SWRC received more than 200 responses to a comprehensive survey that gave voice to sex workers and their experiences with sex migration, healthcare access, criminalization, transgender rights, substance user rights, climate change, and policy in and outside the U.S. regarding the well-being of sex workers.
Of course, "Being treated 'well' by law enforcement/ICE is not enough," reads the SWRC's report. "We want an end to the criminalization and policing of our lives. We consider every arrest for sex work a rights violation. In gathering information about activities to change patterns of policing, we heard from our communities that 'we [sex workers] have always questioned police motives.'
The organization is calling on the U.S. to "end the criminalization of sex workers’ lives in all forms, eliminating discriminatory registries, surveillance systems (including those based on facial recognition and AI), and policing practices that violate their rights and target the most marginalized among us," said a rep.
They also want the U.S. to "invest resources in education, job training, healthcare, and housing programs for marginalized people engaged in sex work, and create new funding approaches based on the promotion of human rights for transgender people and all sex workers," who they want to be recognized as "legitimate rights-holders under international law, ensuring that our voices are included in all policymaking, data collection, and human rights monitoring initiatives."
Zee Xaymaca, who contributed to the SWRC's report, offered her perspective.
"In the current climate, the U.S. is overtly anti-human rights," she said. "We won’t go willingly with this continued shift toward fascism, where people are made increasingly vulnerable so that their fundamental freedoms can be trampled. We resist in every way available and welcome the support of our sibling nations to protect our lives and livelihoods in the face of constant government hostility. At the very least, the world must bear witness to the harm the U.S. perpetrates against trans and queer BIPOC folks and sex workers, as well as the unhoused, migrant, and otherwise vulnerable communities inside and outside of its borders."
The Sex Workers Rights Coalition aims to secure at least one recommendation to the United States from a UN member state calling for the above issues to be addressed, though to date, the U.S. has only accepted one recommendation from the UPR process pertaining to sex workers’ rights.
In 2010, Uruguay successfully persuaded the U.S. to "Undertake awareness-raising campaigns for combating stereotypes and violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals, and ensure access to public services, paying attention to the special vulnerability of sexual workers to violence and human rights abuses."
To access the 2025 UPR reports by the Sex Workers’ Rights Coalition and the Sexual Rights Initiative and keep up to date with the coalition’s UPR work, click here.
