Haiti, Oxfam and Amnesty: time for a rethink

Richard Carver writes:

One of the reasons we teach about human rights at CENDEP is that we think it is important to assert the rights and the agency of those affected by conflict and disasters. The behaviour of some Oxfam personnel in Haiti and Chad underlines, in a particularly distressing manner, why this matters.

Three years ago, Amnesty International, an organization I was honoured to work for in the past, voted to adopt a policy advocating the decriminalization of prostitution. This is an issue about which I know next to nothing but my immediate feeling was that such a policy was unwise, primarily because it seemed to be a question on which reasonable people might disagree, rather than a human rights principle. Some argue for the rights of sex workers; others for the “Nordic solution” of criminalizing use of prostitutes. Empirical studies seemed inconclusive, at least to the casual reader like me.

Now we have the Haiti scandal, in which it has emerged that humanitarian personnel paid women for sex in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. This seems to me to pose a very big problem for the decriminalization camp. Amnesty International is on record as condemning the behaviour of these Oxfam personnel, but why? Surely, Roland van Hauwermeiren and his friends were just injecting hard currency into the local economy. Shouldn't Amnesty’s ire rather be addressed to the Haitian authorities who have criminalized these activities and thereby reduced the livelihood opportunities of the affected population? 

Of course, the reason the Haiti scandal appals us is that it lays bare the power relations that underlie prostitution in all instances. Decriminalization promotes the idea that sex is just an exchangeable commodity like any other. The Oxfam affair tells is that this is false. What Amnesty calls “sex work” is always about gender power and oppression. In Haiti we see an additional layer of racism and neo-colonialism. Our gut response of condemnation is the right one – and Amnesty needs to take a long, hard look at its policy.

Catherine Bennett in the Observer puts it much more eloquently.