Vaz inquiry warned against prosecuting sex workers’ clients
KEITH Vaz leads the powerful Home Affairs Select Committee which is overseeing the biggest shake-up of Britain’s prostitution laws in generations.
And its initial findings warned AGAINST bringing in a new law to prosecute people who pay for sex.
The inquiry was launched in January and unveiled an interim report on July 1. Entitled simply, ‘Prostitution’, it runs to 53 pages.
It took evidence from experts including Nikki Holland, the National Police Chiefs Council’s lead for prostitution and sex work.
Committee members, including Mr Vaz, visited Denmark and Sweden to see differing approaches of dealing with sex workers – male as well as female.
The interim report recommended significant changes in existing laws so that soliciting and brothelkeeping are decriminalised.
It noted that sex work is “often linked to criminality, including trafficking, coercion and illegal drugs”.
And it cautioned against introducing a ‘sex buyer law’ – in place in other countries – which could criminalise men who pay for sex. The report, unveiled in a blaze of publicity, said Mr Vaz’s committee was “not yet persuaded that the sex buyer law is effective in reducing, rather than simply displacing, demand for prostitution, or in helping the police to tackle the crime and exploitation associated with the sex industry.”
It added that a sex buyer law would be “based on the premise that prostitution is morally wrong and should therefore be illegal, whereas at present the law makes no such moral judgement”.
As far back as January 2009, Mr Vaz opposed then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s proposal to introduce new laws criminalising men who pay for sex from prostitutes who have been trafficked.
He told a House of Commons debate on the proposed Police and Crime Bill: “I am not convinced that the best course of action is to prosecute, in the proposed way, men who go into situations where they wish to buy sex from prostitutes.
“Such men are going to be expected to ask whether the woman concerned has been trafficked and, even if they get an incorrect answer, as is highly likely, given the situation these poor women are in, they will then be prosecuted.”
Mr Vaz also worked on a separate earlier inquiry into drugs with Mitch Winehouse, father of the late singer Amy who died after a desperate spiral into class A drug addiction.
He had a private 45-minute meeting with Mr Winehouse in 2011 after Amy’s death aged 27.