Black Lives Matter

Joint Statement on White Supremacy and State Violence in the United States of America

by the Sex Workers Project & the Human Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center

May 31, 2020

The Sex Workers Project (SWP) and the Human Rights Project (HRP) stand in solidarity with all those voicing their outrage at the continued state violence perpetrated against African/Black people in the U.S.  What we see in current events is nothing new.  It is the continuation of hundreds of years of normalized state violence against African/Black people.

HRP asserts that the United States has been in violation of its legal obligations at the local, state and federal level under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) since ratification and that the United Nations must take all possible measures to hold the United States accountable to their obligations under international human rights law.

SWP asserts that our work to decriminalize sex work and decarcerate people in the sex trades is part of a larger movement to end white supremacist criminalization of people of color and indigenous people in this country and we stand in solidarity with all movements seeking to end mass incarceration, police brutality, police murder, the prison industrial complex and all forms of state violence.

Jointly, we demand:

• The de-militarization of all police forces in the United States;
• Funding for mandatory human rights and anti-oppression education in all institutions in this country including all public schools, all police departments and all judicial systems;
• Accountability for public elected officials who express hate speech including Donald Trump;
• Release of complaints and disciplinary records of all police officers that makes all such information public;
• U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the American Declaration of Human Rights, all of which the U.S. is legally bound by;
• The decriminalization of adult consensual sex work and drug possession offenses in all jurisdictions of the United States, as well as the decarceration of individuals impacted by such criminalization including vacatur of past criminal convictions.
• Media contact:  RJ Thompson, Esq. rthompson@urbanjustice.org