PRESS : For Immediate Release
Campaign group, Nordic Model Now! (NMN), is demanding the immediate disbanding of the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into prostitution after chair Keith Vaz MP is witnessed buying young males for sex.
As one of the inquiry’s briefs was to consider whether buying a person for sex should be criminalised, this breach is a conflict of interest which discredits the inquiry.
NMN has already expressed deep reservations[i] about the committee’s interim report which clearly favours a system of full decriminalisation of the sex trade to be introduced in the UK.
We demand that the inquiry be reconvened under a strict ethical framework incorporating:
- At least 50% of the committee members must be female
- A declaration of any history of sex buying by all proposed members
Full decriminalisation means that all aspects of prostitution are exempt from criminal sanction, allowing pimping, brothel keeping, ‘sex’ buying and procuring to operate unfettered.
Nordic Model Now! is a grassroots group campaigning for the Nordic Model approach. This decriminalises those who are prostituted, provides services to help them exit, and makes buying sex a criminal offence, in order to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking.
Ellen Grogan for Nordic Model Now!
[i] http://nordicmodelnow.org/2016/07/17/response-to-the-home-affairs-select-committees-interim-report-on-prostitution/
Update
The press release got picked up by a number of media outlets. The following gave us a mention:
- Campaigners call for Parliamentary inquiry into prostitution to be wound up after Labour MP Keith Vaz ‘consorted with male escorts’
- Prostitution inquiry ‘should be scrapped after Vaz claims’
- Keith Vaz: Call for Vaz-led prostitution inquiry to be axed over sex allegations as Jeremy Corbyn calls it ‘a private matter’
- Charity Commission examines claims around charity set up by Keith Vaz