NEW YORK—The Sex Workers Rights Coalition will send a delegation to Geneva from June 22-28 to meet with representatives from member states that are willing to publicly support the rights of sex workers and transgender people in the United States.
What prompted the delegation is that the United States is facing scrutiny under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism, which the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council employs to review each member state's human rights track record based on international agreements and conventions. UPR is done every five years.
The coalition gathered more than 200 responses to a comprehensive survey allowing sex workers to speak frankly about their experiences with sex migration, healthcare access, criminalization, transgender rights, substance user rights, climate change and domestic policy in and outside the United States as it pertains to sex workers.
The coalition submitted two joint reports to the United Nations review of the United States, including one done in collaboration with the Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI).
The reports to the UN highlight that within the US, “Being treated 'well' by law enforcement/ICE is not enough. We want an end to the criminalization and policing of our lives. We consider every arrest for sex work a rights violation. In gathering information about activities to change patterns of policing, we heard from our communities that 'we [sex workers] have always questioned police motives.'"
In response, the delegation is calling on the United States government to:
1. End the criminalization of sex workers’ lives in all forms, eliminating discriminatory registries, surveillance systems (including those based on facial recognition and AI), and policing practices that violate [sex workers'] rights and target the most marginalized;
2. Recognize sex workers as legitimate rights-holders under international law, ensuring that [their] voices and expertise are included in all policymaking, data collection, and human rights monitoring processes;
3. Invest resources in education, job training, healthcare, and housing programs for marginalized people engaged in sex work;
4. Create new funding approaches based on the promotion of human rights and health for sex workers and transgender people.
The coalition aims to secure at least one recommendation to the United States from a UN member state calling for the above issues to be addressed.
"This mission to Geneva is a refusal to ignore the mechanisms put in place to hold violators accountable because our lives are protected by the UN declarations on Human Rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention for Ending all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and other foundational human rights documents," a Sex Workers Rights Coalition representative said.
Zee Xaymaca, a report contributor, commented, "The [United States] was instrumental in creating these human rights guarantees. Yet, in the current climate, the U.S. is overtly anti-human rights. We won't go willingly with this continued shift toward fascism, where people are made increasingly vulnerable so that their fundamental freedoms can be trampled. We resist in every way available and welcome the support of our sibling nations to protect our lives and livelihoods in the face of constant government hostility.
"At the very least, the world must bear witness to the harm the U.S. perpetrates against trans and queer BIPOC folks, sex workers, unhoused and migrant and otherwise vulnerable communities inside and outside of its borders," Xaymaca added.
Access the 2025 UPR reports by the Sex Workers’ Rights Coalition and the Sexual Rights Initiative here and keep up to date with their UPR work at bestpracticespolicy.org.
