Paying for sex, should it be illegal?

After the first of June it will be illegal to pay for sex in Northern Ireland, though not in the rest of the UK, and a similar measure is being considered in the Republic.

Is this a good idea?



In one of the more novel uses of crowdfunding the law is being challenged in a case that will almost certainly be decided eventually in the ECHR.

Quote:

Dublin-born law graduate Laura Lee is launching an unprecedented legal challenge that could go all the way to Strasbourg, against a human trafficking bill which includes banning the payment for sex among consenting adults. The region is the only part of the UK where people can be convicted of paying for sex. The law, which was championed by Democratic Unionist peer and Stormont assembly member Lord Morrow, comes into effect on 1 June. Lee told the Guardian she will launch her case at the high court in Belfast in the same month as the law comes into effect. Lee, 37, said: “I am doing this because I believe that when two consenting adults have sex behind closed doors and if money changes hands then that is none of the state’s business. The law they have introduced has nothing to do with people being trafficked but simply on their, the DUP’s, moral abhorrence of paid sex. “I believe that after June 1st, sex workers’ lives in Northern Ireland will actually be harder and the industry will be pushed underground.” Lee, who lives in Edinburgh but travels to Belfast and Dublin to see clients, said her legal team would be referencing several articles of the European convention on human rights to challenge and overturn Morrow’s law. “First of all we will need to exhaust domestic remedies starting in the Belfast high court, possibly going to the supreme court, the House of Lords and eventually the European court of human rights.

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Link.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1Fqh5to