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France’s far-right National Rally (RN) party wants to reopen brothels run directly by sex workers.
The party is preparing to submit a bill to parliament recommending that brothels, which were banned in France 1946, be reopened as cooperatives managed by sex workers, according to RN lawmaker Jean-Philippe Tanguy.
The politician told the Le Monde newspaper that party leader Marine Le Pen backed the bill.
“Sex workers would be empresses in their kingdom,” Tanguy told the radio station RTL.
Prostitution itself is legal in France, although brothels, pimping and the sale of sex by minors are illegal.
A 2016 law passed by the Socialist Party under then-President François Hollande decriminalised soliciting yet punished clients of sex workers with a fine of €1,500.
Tanguy said the legislation had made sex workers’ lives more precarious and dangerous by driving the trade underground through the criminalisation of clients.
“They get beaten up, sometimes have their throats slit, and no one talks about it. [The current system is] the height of bourgeois hypocrisy,” he told Le Monde.
However, several sex worker associations and NGOs have criticised Tanguy’s plan.
“Recreating places where human beings are locked up, just to satisfy the sexual needs of men that are considered irrepressible, no, that’s unimaginable,” Delphine Jarraud of the sex worker support group Amicale du Nid told Le Monde.
There is also reportedly strong opposition due to the party’s hardline anti-immigration stance and the fact that majority of sex workers in France are estimated to not be French nationals.
Across Europe, the debate over how to approach sex work has raged for decades, especially since the early 2000s, when the Netherlands began regulating prostitution.
In 2022, Belgium became the only country in Europe to decriminalise sex work, while the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria all have some form of legalised prostitution.