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Tensions of abolitionism during the negotiation of the 1949 ‘Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others’

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the negotiations for the ‘Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others’ adopted by the General Assembly (GA) of the United Nations (UN) in 1949. This convention significantly shifted the international approach towards ‘traffic in persons’ by adopting a so-called ‘regulation-abolitionist’ approach and mandating the abolition of the then dominant national approach to prostitution: ‘state-regulated prostitution’. International anti-trafficking law, for the first time, explicitly addressed national prostitution laws and, therefore, prostitution itself. Regulation-abolitionism called for the abolition of ‘state-regulated prostitution’ as a way of both freeing prostitutes from the discriminatory treatment of the police and other state actors, but also as a strategy to combat human trafficking. Through careful analysis of the documentary record concerning some of the core articles of the Convention, the paper identifies multiple contradictions and ‘tensions of abolitionism’ during the negotiations for the Convention, as well as competing ideas about the social and legal status of prostitution and people selling sex after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution. Most importantly, the moral condemnation of prostitution persisted across the political spectrum and the nascent ideological fault lines of the Cold War. In terms of actors, the paper focuses on the contribution of civil society actors, UN administrative personnel and two states (France and the United Kingdom). This paper proposes the concept of tensions of abolitionism to capture the ways in which the regulation-abolitionist approach was caught between competing goals: the law-enforcement-centred repression (of exploitation), the deregulation of prostitution via the abolition of state regulation and the guarantee of the human rights of prostitutes vis-à-vis the state. The paper stresses the legacy of the 1949 Convention in re-structuring the practice of commercial sex to the detriment of sex workers and its failure in eliminating human trafficking.