Library of Parliament Review of Legislation on Prostitution

As the status of the various Criminal Code provisions concerning prostitution floats its inevitable way upward towards the Supreme Court, now that the Ontario Court of Appeal has struck down some of them, readers of Slaw might like to learn something about how the matter is handled in other countries. The ever helpful Legal and Legislative Affairs Division of the Library of Parliament’s Information and Research Service has released online a “Prostitution: A Review of Legislation in Selected Countries” (by Laura Barnett, Lyne Casavant, and Julia Nicol) [PDF].

The countries examined are Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, England and the US states California and Nevada, each of which takes a somewhat different approach ranging from prohibition to legalization.

From the conclusion of the report:

. . . There is little evidence that any particular approach has met all of its objectives.

None of the countries and states examined in this paper have repealed all of their prostitution-related criminal laws. However, a number of governments have chosen to supplement criminal legislation with local by-laws, city ordinances, and other measures, thereby suggesting that, for many of these countries, prostitution is not simply a legislative concern. It is also a social and economic issue that calls for the use of public policy and other social intervention measures in order to address the needs of both individual sex workers and their communities.