At the informal meeting of the EU justice ministers in Brussels, they touched on the legalization of other crimes related to prostitution.
As a starting point, it should be emphasized that the category of European criminal law is becoming more and more accepted based on the relevant provisions of the TFEU (Article 79, Articles 82-89, Article 325). However, this means a limited criminal power, and based on a 2011 announcement by the European Commission, national criminal law "reflects the basic values, customs and choices of any given society" and is therefore closely related to national identity.
The Hungarian Penal Code recognizes many crimes related to prostitution, its facilitation, and coercion, which defines prostitution as a sexual act carried out for the purpose of regular profit-making. Such a situation is the promotion of prostitution, the use of the Fence, Persistence, or, for example, Child Prostitution, in connection with which a person who maintains or runs a brothel, or provides financial means for the operation of a brothel in which a person under the age of eighteen engages in prostitution, is specifically named, and his act is punishable by imprisonment from two to eight years.
The basic characteristic of crimes (as well as the immanent criterion for declaring them a punishable act) is that they are dangerous to society. An act dangerous to society is an activity or omission that violates or endangers the person or rights of others, as well as the social, economic, and state order according to the Basic Law of Hungary. If an act in a democratic state of law has been classified as dangerous to society and therefore illegal once, based on practice and international standards, it will not lose its "dangerous to society" character in the future either. As a starting point, it is important to distinguish between decriminalization and legalization. Decriminalization refers to the removal of criminal sanctions for certain acts, although fines may still apply (as opposed to legalization, which is a complete exemption from any sanctions). Through decriminalization, the legislator decides that an activity will ultimately be removed from the range of activities declared as a crime, and the perpetrator can expect a lighter punishment. According to some approaches, organized crime could be better stopped if the promotion and organization of prostitution were a legal activity. In fact, this would not stop organized crime, it would only serve to improve the statistics, since if an act is not classified as a crime, it will not be included in the criminal statistics - but this does not stop the activity and, most importantly, the victims their number will not decrease either, and moreover, the passive subjects of the crime will not benefit from the protection of the criminal law - the protective net that the deterrent effect of the punishment has formed until now would also disappear. (It is worth noting that the most serious deterrent is the inevitability of the punishment, not the severity of the punishment, so the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies is extremely important.)
The decriminalization of sex work is a controversial issue, especially in relation to whether only prostitutes or "entrepreneurs" in the sex industry should be decriminalized.
Opponents of decriminalization argue that human trafficking will increase because it greatly benefits the "fencers" and traffickers by turning them into "entrepreneurs." The phenomenon of radical legal protection shown by NGOs, often manifesting themselves as political organizations, is interesting: in the past, among others, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other organizations have called on states to decriminalize prostitution as part of a global plan to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. as an effort.
There are professional opinions that legalization could lead to the state encouraging women to engage in prostitution. In the state of Nevada, the local government considered prostitution a win-win situation for a long time, for example, compared to social assistance, and they tried to promote the matter at the state level until they finally tried to stop the process with huge counter-campaigns.
Decriminalization is often caused by a change in society's moral views, but this question and process cannot be decided by anyone from the outside, even by "social engineering" forced from international or supranational decision-making centers.
The handling of the migration crisis in recent years clearly shows that the community attempt to legalize mass immigration (to make irregular migration legally acceptable) can have a rather negative effect in terms of increasing migration pressure (and otherwise the related criminal law aspects): border protection, border policing procedures international attack etc. It is also a serious failure of the encouraging and liberalizing and decriminalizing policy of Brussels that, thanks to the encouraged migration processes, the number of certain crimes has been increasing in Western Europe for years: gang rapes, crimes related to drug trafficking, physical attacks on ATMs, vandalism, etc. .
The growing human trafficking along the migration routes is also an important issue from the point of view of prostitution, and in some states of Western Europe, migrant prostitution is already taking on increasingly serious proportions. One very controversial practical example of decriminalization is that in the affected France, prostitution is considered an otherwise tolerated act. In 2022, the number of registered victims of human trafficking was 10,093 in the EU, which represents an increase of 41.1% compared to the previous year, and this is the highest recorded value in the period 2008-2022: Brussels' policy has failed completely.
As far as human trafficking is concerned, every fourth victim in Europe is a minor, and in many cases migrant minors brought by smugglers are affected (even in sex trafficking). It would also be worth calling out the decision-makers in Brussels who criticize the member states who argue for a critical, strict European action against migration (and the necessary solution of the problems in the local, source countries) and who attack the member states who also want to take strict action against human trafficking. At the same time, the EU has started to think about the concept of EU criminal law policy: a 2011 communication from the European Commission contains some points regarding a possible concept, adding at the same time that national criminal law "reflects the basic values, customs and choices of any given society". However, the attitude of Brussels to this day is highly contradictory and inconsistent, whether it is about issues of decriminalization or other aspects of criminal law.
Source: Basic Law Blog
Cover image: Illustration by Gerd Altmann /Pixabay
