Legal frameworks for remunerated sexual services often reveal a weakness in our democracies: how to protect sex workers as a marginalized group without patronizing them. A bill recently introduced in the French Senate proposes to replace the current End-Demand legislation with full decriminalization. Drafted by a mixed group of interdisciplinary researchers and sex workers of different backgrounds, the bill tackles this weakness head-on.

Sex workers’ active participation of in drafting the bill led to a nuanced and detailed text. It not only eliminates incoherencies in the existing legal framework, but also emphasises the protection of sex workers’ rights – and therefore, crucially, has the support of those affected.

From an exclusionary legislative framework…

The current legislation dates back to 2016 and rests on two main pillars. First, the law criminalizes paying for sexual services while offering said services officially remains legal. Second, so-called “exit programs” (parcours de sortie de prostitution, or PSP) offer those who want to leave sex work social, financial and educational support to change profession. An often overlooked third element of the legislation made assaulting a sex worker an aggravating circumstance (Art. 11, loi n° 2016-444). The model, first introduced in Sweden in the 1990s, aims to reduce demand for sexual services and thereby suppress – or at least significantly diminish – sex work, which it considers an obstacle to gender equality (hence: End-Demand Model).

Critics raise both factual and legal objections to the French legislation On the factual side, sex workers’ living and working conditions have substantially deteriorated, and violence against them has risen. On the legal side, the law does not differentiate between sex work that is freely exercised and human trafficking.

Before their adoption, the proposals for the 2016 legislation drew the same criticism that has proven well-founded ten years later. That the law was nonetheless adopted can be linked to the testimonial injustice that sex workers often face: The term coined by Fricker refers to a deficit of credibility attributed to a speaker du to prejudice on the hearer’s part. Opposition to the End-demand-legislation had little impact on the legislative process, which was steered by a handful of elected officials in favour of its adoption. Community organizations had fewer opportunities to be heard than abolitionist organizations. Parliamentary debates rested on poorly substantiated estimations of exploitation and the portrayal of sex workers as victims of exploitation. This created an atmosphere in which lawmakers could dismiss any dissenting voice: active sex workers were automatically discredited as privileged and therefore unrepresentative.

When protest during the legislative procedure brought no change, community organizations turned to strategic litigation. National courts and the ECHR ruled against the appellants, relying on the margin of appreciation of the national parliament and emphasizing that parliament had debated these issues during long, thorough and balanced procedures. At the constitutional level, the Conseil constitutionnel not only declined to second-guess the political choices underlying the law but also refused scrutiny of their factual basis. This judicial restraint is standard practice, but it entrenched the assumption that most sex work is forced and left intact the epistemic exclusion of active sex workers claiming the opposite. The ECHR followed the same path: it stayed within its established practice and used none of the available means to give weight to the testimonies of active sex workers, whose voices disappeared behind the margin of appreciation left to parliament.

… to active participation in the legislative process

To address this the research project “Droit(s) et Politique(s) du Travail Sexuel 2026” ,created at the Centre de Recherches Critiques sur le Droit (CERCRID) at the University of St. Étienne, France, aimed at a new approach. It brought together a multidisciplinary team of academic researchers, sex workers, sex worker-led organizations (e.g. Fédération du Parapluie Rouge, Tullia) and allies (Médecins du Monde) to work out a legislative proposal that considers the needs of sex workers from the outset. The project culminated in a bill that Paris senator Anne Souyris introduced in the French Senate. A two-day conference accompanied the introduction, taking stock of a decade of End-Demand legislation and setting out the circumstances of the new project.

The heart of the project was a community consultation involving around 70 people who participated in workshops supported by translators and, where needed, cultural mediation. The research group collectively developed criteria for workshop participation to ensure a representation of the broad range of sex workers as well as third parties, differing in migration background, age and situation. Participating organizations across France received these criteria and either reached out to individuals within their clientele who matched the relevant profile or circulated the information in their network. These workshops mapped out sex workers’ concerns, which the team later used to draft the bill.

What are the proposed changes?

The bill takes a broad approach. Rather than creating special legislation for sex workers, it integrates them into existing legal frameworks like criminal law and employment law that already contain protective mechanisms suited to securing sex workers’ human rights. Unlike the 2016 legislation, which leaned heavily on values like equality and human dignity, this text focuses strikingly on whether its regulations will concretely improve sex workers’ living and working conditions. It therefore contains hardly any provisions open to accusations of moral policymaking. This also means fewer incoherencies – to name only the most glaring: criminalizing payment for a service whose provision is not itself illegal.

In criminal law, this translates into abolishing all pimping offenses, which currently extend to almost all third party-related activity, as well as the criminalization of demand for sexual services. Instead, the bill proposes to focus explicitly on harmful and exploitative conduct which existing criminal offenses such as slavery, forced labour, human trafficking and extortion already cover.

The bill also recognizes sex work not exercised under exploitative conditions as a legal economic activity (activité économique licite) under the French employment code. It proposes tax breaks as incentives to create businesses where sex workers hold effective control, an option considered less susceptible to exploitation. To combat stigma, the bill proposes adding discrimination on the grounds of a legal economic activity to art. 225-1 of the Criminal Code.

The bill centers sex workers as experts on their own situation. Community organizations therefore play a key role: they are the ones who oversee safe working conditions and coordinate the exit programs that are to be reshaped more broadly into programs offering access to rights, social integration, and career transitions.

The bill addresses the diversity of sex workers’ situations by including an article restricting abusive business strategies for online platforms. Lastly, it addresses the protection of minors, which the evaluation of the 2016 legislation identified as an overlooked problem.

A blueprint for inclusive democracy

This is only the beginning, and the bill still has a long way to go. Its prospects remain uncertain in a French political climate increasingly marked by conservative shifts and anti-immigration sentiment. Outside the sex worker community, the abolitionist End-Demand model continues to enjoy support. Yet the project is already breaking new ground.

Sex work remains a controversial subject. The protection of individuals must be weighed against societal values like equality, morality or public decency. Which of these values takes precedence is, according to the relevant courts, a choice for society to make. Yet if “society” equates with the parliamentary decision-making process, active sex workers are not sufficiently represented. This epistemic imbalance weakens the democratic foundation of the legislation as well as the idea of human rights protection that extends to the margins of society.

The values and concerns of “society” – particularly its more privileged segments – are already sufficiently represented within parliamentary institutions. Concerns like public morals, human dignity and restrictive migration regimes will enter the decision-making as soon as the bill moves to the next steps of the legislative procedure. By including sex workers as experts in the drafting process, the proposal remedies their potential exclusion in the following steps. If the bill goes to parliament, their input will already shape the subject and framework of the debates. The proposal’s focus on concrete protective mechanisms, rather than moral policymaking, makes an actual human rights-based approach to sex work more likely – one that actually improves the living and working conditions of those affected.

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