Amnesty International will finalise its new policy on prostitution this month. It follows a vote in August by the organisation’s leadership – in the face of global protests – to push countries to fully decriminalise the sex trade, sex-buying and brothel-keeping included. Not only is Amnesty’s plan, in my view, dangerously misguided, it also relies on evidence from the very people it should be holding to account.

Amnesty’s draft policy cites support from “human rights organisations” for the call to decriminalise brothels. “Most significantly,” it states, “a large number of sex worker organisations and networks, including the Global Network of Sex Work Projects [NSWP], support the decriminalisation of sex work.” Yet in March this year Alejandra Gil, the NSWP’s former vice-president, was jailed for 15 years for sex trafficking.

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This isn’t just one unfortunate reference to the group, a singular blip in an otherwise scrupulously sourced document. Amnesty’s draft policy also cites as evidence a report written by the NSWP; a report annexe written by the UNAids “advisory group on HIV and sex work” – which is co-chaired by the NSWP; and a World Health Organisation (WHO) report in which Gil is personally acknowledged as one of the “experts” who helped develop its recommendations. The organisation’s logo is on the report’s front cover, alongside those of the WHO, UNAaids and the United Nations Population Fund.

What this exposes is how staggeringly successful Gil’s group has been in pushing its agenda to legitimise commercial sexual exploitation through some of the world’s top human rights institutions. Known as the “Madam of Sullivan”, Gil is reported to have been at the centre of a pimping operation in Mexico City, sexually exploiting around 200 women. What is crucial to recognise, however, is that Gil didn’t have to hide her vested interests as a pimp in her NSWP role. The group campaigns for pimping and brothel-keeping to be recognised as ordinary work. According to NSWP policy, as a pimp Gil was a “sex worker” whose precise role was a “manager”. So why did UNAids award this group a formal advisory role?

The NSWP, meanwhile, still describes its former vice-president as a “human rights defender”. A woman who said she had been trafficked to Mexico City, and exploited by Gil, told a journalist in Mexico: “Her job was to watch us from the car. She or her son took us to hotels and charged us fees. She kept records. She had a list where she kept records of everything. She even wrote down how long you took.” The lawyer representing Gil’s victims explained to me that she was convicted because “she received trafficked victims” and “deceived to exploit them through the exercise of [prostitution]”.

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Much of the influence wielded by the NSWP can be traced back to 2007, when UNAids published a guidance note recommending that countries tackle demand for prostitution as part of HIV prevention efforts. Ending the demand that underpins profits reaped by “third party” profiteers such as Gil was of course anathema to the NSWP. It complained to UNAids, which astonishingly responded by appointing the NSWP as co-chair of its new “advisory group on HIV and sex work”.

A revised version of the guidance note was subsequently published, this time carrying an “annexe” written by the advisory group. It recommends decriminalising “management of sex workers and brothels”, as well as “shifting the strategic focus away from reduction of demand for sex work”. That report has proved critical to legitimising the NSWP’s call to make brothel-keeping and pimping – aka commercial sexual exploitation – legal.

Demand for prostitution is not inevitable. During the 1990s the number of men who pay for sex in the UK almost doubled. If it can grow it can also shrink, and that is exactly what has been shown in countries such as Sweden and Norway that have adopted the sex buyer law, where being paid for sex is decriminalised but paying for sex is criminalised. It’s an approach advocated by organisations in the End Demand alliance, including Women’s Aid, Equality Now and the End Violence Against Women coalition. The Women’s Equality party has also said it would introduce this law. The failure to address demand in UK policy is reflected in practice. In 2013-14 there were over double the number of prosecutions for soliciting or loitering for prostitution than for kerb crawling. This means it is the women that men pay for sex who overwhelmingly face criminal sanction, rather than the men themselves. In fact, in 2013-14 there were more prosecutions for loitering and soliciting than for the crimes of pimping, brothel-keeping, kerb crawling and advertising prostitution combined.

The Crown Prosecution Service rightly recognises prostitution as violence against women. The men who pay for sex and the brothel-keepers who collect their money are perpetrators and exploiters, not consumers and entrepreneurs. Tomorrow activists are holding a global day of action protesting at Amnesty’s decision to endorse the decriminalisation of brothels and sex buyers. Indeed, Amnesty and UNAids have big questions to answer about the groups they have taken policy advice from. But more than anything, we need government to take the burden of criminality off people exploited through prostitution and put it where it belongs: with sex buyers.