“It’s inconceivable to me that Amnesty International or any other organization that respects human rights would endorse slave masters who buy young girls and put them into involuntary servitude to be sex slaves,” says Carter. “And when they go and do this with brothel owners and pimps, then to me that violates the basic principles of human rights.”
Former President Jimmy Carter at Women’s Media Center on April 30, 2014.
Jimmy Carter has volunteered to write a letter to Amnesty International strongly condemning a draft policy proposing the decriminalization of pimps and brothel keepers, after the document was brought to his attention during an exclusive interview with Robin Morgan, author, activist, and host of Women’s Media Center Live.
Abolish Prostitution Now thanks Jimmy Carter for his clear outspokenness in favor of the human rights of women and girls and everybody in prostitution or threatened by the system of prostitution. We admire and are deeply grateful to Robin Morgan for her work and for this interview. Robin Morgan’s comment at the end of the interview are a must to listen to. The issue is – harm – not ‘choice’.
Jimmy Carter has already denounced the full decriminalization of brothel-keeping and pimping, and endorsed the Nordic Model in his statement “How Canada Can Revise Its Prostitution Laws” from December 27, 2013.
As Carter says in the interview: “Because in the United States there are 50 girls who are arrested for every one brothel owner or pimp or male customer” – we need a model that will decriminalize these girls and women, and target the first in the line of abusers, the buyers.
If Amnesty International succeeds in its pimp- and pro-prostitution lobby-inspired stance of decriminalizing all aspects of prostitution, that will be almost the end of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as we know and understand it. They will not have brought it down alone, there have been other forces undermining the foundation of global human rights, but the impact of AI to decriminalize and remain the leading human rights NGO of the UN cannot be underestimated. The concept of Human Rights, and of Human Dignity as universal, inalienable and shared by all equally will be replaced by the idea of “dignity” being a marketable, individual stance that is at all times subject to market forces. Safeguarding human rights – and the rights of marginalized and disadvantaged groups like women and girls – will no longer happen from the standpoint of their inalienable rights, but merely from the point of view of improving their sales opportunities.
This is unacceptable. It means giving free reign to those in power, that is those with money. Just as decriminalizing all aspects of prostitution basically means giving free reign to pimps, traffickers, brothel owners and punters. The question will no longer be – how can women and girls (and boys and men) be kept out of prostitution, which we know to be devastating – but: How can we devise ways to make prostitution sound good, and to let those in prostitution keep a fraction of the money that is being passed around among powerful men? This is not Human Rights.
Links to the statements and interview:
Robin Morgan’s great interview with Jimmy Carter, and comments:
Press Release by the Women’s Media Center:
Article in the Washington Examiner: Jimmy Carter slaps Amnesty International for backing ‘slave masters’ in sex trade:
Statement by Jimmy Carter published on the Jimmy Carter Center’s website:
https://www.cartercenter.org/news/editorials_speeches/jc-canadas-prostitution-laws.html
Abolish Prostitution Now! 