The #CEDAW General Recommendation on trafficking was adopted in November 2020. In this #GSWF2020 session, speakers from @GAATW_IS, @GlobalSexWork, @Ke_swa, @SexualRights, the Remedy Project and IWRAW Asia Pacific will reflect on its content. Watch live:

The rhetoric of trafficking and its elimination is used as a pretext to control women's agency. The #CEDAW Committee had an opportunity to deliver a human-rights-based approach instead, going beyond crime control and border control - Pooja, @SexualRights #GSWF2020

We challenge the conflation of trafficking and sex work. #CEDAW GR 38 has done nothing to change that. My work and life will not be safe. People will see me as a victim of trafficking, not as a person who is carrying out work - Phelister, @Ke_swa #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 makes us feel disrespected as sex workers. We participated in advocacy and contributed recommendations. We feel this is disrespect. We raised concerns that are important to us as a community - Phelister, @Ke_swa #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 denies us the right to bodily autonomy as women. My voice as a woman has been shut down in this space. #SexWorkIsWork - Phelister, @Ke_swa #GSWF2020

Two histories of Asia - we have from medieval times history of conquest and slavery, and also history of courtesans. From that history I look at #CEDAW GR 38 - Radhika Coomaraswamy, former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women #GSWF2020

A positive of #CEDAW GR 38 is its attention to safe migration. But the market model of demand and supply has been superimposed upon a criminal accountability model. The strategy of criminalising demand goes against the lived reality of women - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

I have met women who do both domestic work and sex work to feed their families. We should respect the choice that women are making. Unless we change the macro factors that eliminate gender-based violence, we cannot take away women's choices - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 loses focus between migration and trafficking. Traffickers fish in the sea of migration. Legal migration, human smuggling and trafficking are all different legal concepts. They vary by degrees of consent - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

It is very important if we are looking at human rights and women’s subjectivity - and #CEDAW is the body for women’s rights - we have to give consideration to women’s consent. Migration and trafficking seem to collapse into each other in GR 38 - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

Intermediaries and state officials start making decisions for women when there is the type of ambiguity seen in #CEDAW GR 38. The decisions are not always in the best interests of women. Women have been miserable at being ‘rescued’ - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 empowers the State to spy on everyone. It should have a better understanding of the role of the State and recognise that we are not looking at a benign State - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

It is important to completely delink trafficking and prostitution. From @GAATW_IS' lens, #CEDAW GR 38 is a disappointment. Coming 20 years after the Palermo Protocol, it could do a lot more. Instead it chose to be regressive and backward-looking - Bandana Pattanaik #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 shuttles between two phrases ‘exploitation of prostitution of others’ and ‘exploitation of prositution’ as if both are the same - Bandana Pattanaik, @GAATW_IS #GSWF2020

GR 38's provisions on labour rights are commendable & meet a gap in #CEDAW Committee’s practice previously. However, it does not recognise sex workers as workers. This omission seems deliberate, as sex workers have been organising around this GR - Bandana, @GAATW_IS #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 wilfully ignores the anti-trafficking work of sex workers' rights organisations. Many more feminist organisations are in solidarity with sex workers than 20 years ago. The #CEDAW Committee had the opportunity to recognise this progress - Bandana, @GAATW_IS #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 could have tied up loose ends left by Palermo. It was a disappointment in the sense that there was a chaotic conflation of trafficking and sex work. The reference to the 1949 Convention made me feel we are going backwards not forward - Archana Kotecha #GSWF2020

The idea of these international conventions/instruments is to respond to the lived realities of persons, and certainly not to take sides on a particular issue. Rather than social justice, #CEDAW GR 38 is still largely focused on criminal justice - Archana Kotecha #GSWF2020

Some progressive measures in #CEDAW GR 38, e.g. on corporate accountability, and guarantees of non-criminalisation and non-conditionality in relation to trafficking and safe migration - Archana Kotecha, Remedy Project #GSWF2020

What is confusing in #CEDAW GR 38 is that it says sex workers do not have the right to work safely because it argues for criminalising demand. The GR does not reflect the hard choices made by women everywhere - Archana Kotecha, Remedy Project #GSWF2020

In much of #CEDAW GR 38, women are treated as passive victims. Its analysis of demand & supply is simplistic, especially re labour exploitation. It starts by highlighting neoliberalism as a root cause but otherwise shows acceptance of neoliberalism - Archana Kotecha #GSWF2020

Incredibly disappointed that #CEDAW, a body that was set up to eliminate discrimination, has chosen to discriminate against a sizeable number of women. It seems their ideology does not let them see our humanity, let alone our bodily autonomy - Ruth, @GlobalSexWork #GSWF2020

I feel it incredible that the #CEDAW Committee has discounted the voices of so many sex workers. @GlobalSexWork has 300 member organisations. This is a global movement - Ruth Morgan Thomas #GSWF2020

We were so disappointed that #CEDAW GR 38 excluded the voices of so many people. It also reinforced questions many of us had been asking about international advocacy processes and spaces. Whose voices are power holders listening to? - @prifernando53, IWRAW AP #GSWF2020

Whose information is being privileged over and above the knowledge, experience and analysis of marginalised groups - sex workers in this instance? Why and how are these processes set up that allow denial and exclusion to happen?
- @prifernando53, IWRAW AP #GSWF2020

#CEDAW GR 38 is done and dusted, and there are challenges to how we can use it - but equally important is making sure that similar exclusions do not happen in the future - @prifernando53, IWRAW AP #GSWF2020

Our community mobilised around GR 38. 20% of the submissions sent to the #CEDAW Committee were from the sex worker community. We knew this General Recommendation could be a threat to us. Yet we were treated as expendable - Ruth Morgan Thomas, @GlobalSexWork #GSWF2020

We are being asked how this is discrimination. The conflation of trafficking, prostitution, sex work is dangerous. It treates sex workers differently - Ruth Morgan Thomas, @GlobalSexWork #GSWF2020

Our frustration doesn't mean that @GlobalSexWork won't be going to #CEDAW in future. We have been supporting national members to engage in CEDAW advocacy. We will continue making our voices heard. We won't be silenced by this General Recommendation - Ruth Morgan Thomas #GSWF2020

Questions about the accountability of the #CEDAW Committee. It is supposed to represent all women, a big responsibility. How is it possible and acceptable when voices are not heard and represented as they should be? - Archana Kotecha, Remedy Project #GSWF2020

Accountability can be created by looking at the composition of the #CEDAW Committee & the processes that go into the making of the Committee. GR 38 will stay. We have to fight the confusion it creates re trafficking, sexual exploitaiton, prostituton - Archana Kotecha #GSWF2020

Those of us with privileges in the women’s movement have to make sure that voices that are being excluded are heard, but without slipping into tokenisation. At the national level, the harmful impact of #CEDAW GR 38 should be critiqued & documented - Bandana, @GAATW_IS #GSWF2020

The movement has been hijacked in a sense by those interested in crime and punishment rather than human rights. Major States and groups of States are supporting them. They have managed to silence other voices in this process - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

We have to find formulas to practice democracy in the movement, that allow all voices to be heard - not just the loudest or those that are in the ‘majority’. We need to build a democratic and inclusive women’s movement - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

IWRAW Asia Pacific should analyse the process leading to #CEDAW GR 38 - how did it turn out like this, especially when there were so many vibrant voices of sex workers involved? It could be an interesting case study for the women's movements - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

In Kenya’s #CEDAW review process, we showed the challenges faced by migrant sex workers. It was a moment when many migrants were being murdered in Kenya simply because they did not have papers - Phelister, @Ke_swa #GSWF2020

Women whose voices are not generally heard see #CEDAW as a space to claim their rights when these rights are denied in their national context. We have to think about all those whose voices could be excluded in future - @prifernando53, IWRAW AP #GSWF2020

We live in a capitalist society. I would like to see a society where there is no poverty. Sex work is not the only form of employment that is undesirable, but it is always picked out as being so. I would like to challenge you to think about that - Ruth, @GlobalSexWork #GSWF2020

All women should be able to choose the work they like. I would like to see a social justice approach as opposed to a criminal justice approach. The latter fuels a discussion of demand & supply, and leads to the criminalisation of women and nothing else - Archana Kotecha #GSWF2020

We in a system that is anti-people in general & particularly anti-poor. How to achieve change if we divide ourselves & exclude those who we think aren't doing the right things? I hope we learn to practise solidarity much more in the feminist movement - Bandana @GAATW_IS #GSWF2020

We can’t underestimate the role #CEDAW has played in relation to women’s rights. There is no need to stop now - Radhika Coomaraswamy #GSWF2020

This concludes the #GSWF2020 session on #CEDAW General Recommendation 38! For more on trafficking, see the FACT Manifesto, which we co-created with partners and allies in the labour rights, migrant rights, sex workers’ rights and women’s rights movements: https://www.iwraw-ap.org/fact/ 

Our colleagues at @SexualRights and @GAATW_IS have also shared highlights from today's #GSWF2020 discussion on #CEDAW GR 38 - visit their threads:

https://twitter.com/SexualRights/status/1339158664771489792 https://twitter.com/GAATW_IS/status/1339159837305876480