It’s official: On Wednesday night, Amnesty International released its long-awaited policy on an incredibly contentious issue, calling on governments around the world to “decriminalize consensual sex work.” Amnesty also wants countries to “include sex workers in the development of laws that affect their lives and safety” and ensure they are “protected from harm, exploitation and coercion.”

The hullabaloo over Amnesty’s stance on sex work started last summer, when 500 delegates from 80 countries voted in favor of an initial recommendation to decriminalize. The recommendation was denounced by groups whose goal is to end prostitution, which they see as a source of sexual inequality and harmful to women. Amnesty drew support from public-health advocates and activists who see decriminalization as the best means of reducing the harms associated with the sex industry, including underage prostitution, trafficking and violence. The debate will surely repeat itself, and it will almost as surely be rife with accusations of betrayal.

The opposing sides in the decriminalization debate agree that it’s wrong to arrest people (mostly women) who engage in prostitution. You might think that common ground would matter more than the differences between them. That’s what I imagined when I started reporting a cover story for the magazine about this topic several months ago. But it doesn’t. Groups that want to curtail prostitution by “ending demand,” some of which call themselves abolitionist, advocate for the arrest and prosecution of men who buy sex and of third parties in the sex trade. This legal framework is called the Nordic Model. Sex workers’ rights groups (including, in the United States, Sex Workers Outreach Project USA, the Desiree Alliance and the Best Practices Policy Project) generally oppose it. And now Amnesty has come out against the Nordic Model, issuing a lengthy report on Norway to explain why. (The human rights group also issued reports on sex work and the law in Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea and Argentina.)

Norway adopted the Nordic model in 2009 (following Sweden, which did so in 1999). Amnesty’s researchers spoke to 54 people in Norway, including police officers, prosecutors, academics, social science providers and 30 sex workers, including three victims of trafficking. (Many of the other sex workers said they sold sex because of economic hardship. Recognizing this, Amnesty also called for broader access to education and other employment.) Amnesty’s basic finding is that Norway’s laws punish people who sell sex — not through arrest but in a variety of other ways. One researcher told Amnesty that police forces in Oslo “often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market.” Or as an expert adviser to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security put it: “It comes back to the question of ‘is it a problem that people in prostitution are in trouble.’ No one has said at a political level that we want prostitutes to have a good time while we also try to stamp out prostitution.”