3rd March is the International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. On this day, sex workers join the efforts for social justice and respect and protection of fundamental human rights.
All people are born equal in terms of dignity and rights. Regardless of the reasons, sex workers who have voluntarily engaged in sex work should be treated with dignity and should be entitled to the rights to protection of labor relations and the workplace. However, sex workers in the Republic of North Macedonia are a socially marginalized community, which faces severe stigma and discrimination with very frequent violations of their human rights.
Despite the fact that the Prevention and Protection from Violence against Women and Domestic Violence Law from 2021, for the first time ever recognizes female sex workers as a vulnerable category, they are still victims of widespread hate speech, stigma and discrimination, and more often than not subjected to violence at the hands of police officials, their clients and members of their families/households.
In the period between 2021 and 2022 alone, there were 34 documented cases in which sex workers reported a violation of a human right. The majority of the reported cases pertain to gender-based violence, domestic violence and hate violence, but the cases reported to the police are not officially treated as such and sex workers are not recognized as victims of violence.
Currently, STAR is conducting a research amongst the sex workers community in our country – Access to Justice, as an integral part of a broader research conducted by the European Sex Workers Rights Alliance in nine European countries, including RNM. The objective of this study is to gather data related to the difficulties and challenges that sex workers face when it comes to access to justice, and focuses on the relationship between sex workers and the police in particular. Sex workers are not well-informed with regard to their rights when they have contact with the police, and are very frequently subjected to additional victimization. Exactly due to the institutional discrimination, poor economic power, low level of legal literacy, mistrust in the institutions, sex workers are discouraged to report any form of violence. In cases when they actually do report violence, due to the fear and their conviction that the legal system does not work equally for all citizens, they tend to give up and fail to go through all proceedings until their completion. Unfortunately, those cases remain unsolved, and sex workers do not exercise institutional justice.
We are strongly convinced that sex work decriminalization will contribute to reduction of institutionalized discrimination, which sex workers are faced with as one of the most marginalized communities in the Macedonian society, which in turn will contribute to increase in their trust in institutions and the mechanisms for protection of their rights. Sex work decriminalization will lead to recognition of sex work as work and realization of rights and freedoms of sex workers as guaranteed in the Constitution and the legal system in the Republic of North Macedonia.