YNOT EUROPE – Members of the Prague City Council have voted to decriminalize prostitution, according to a Czech Radio report. Although council members backed Deputy Mayor Rudolf Blažek’s proposal to license and tax sex workers as long as they contain their trade to brothels or private homes, official changes to local law cannot occur unless the Czech Parliament withdraws from a 1950 United Nations human trafficking convention. The city council resolved to make a formal request in that regard.

In theory, if not in literal fact, the vote removed prostitution from a legal gray area in which it has existed since the fall of communism. An estimated 70 brothels exist in and around the city, but officials pretend not to notice. Blažek told The Prague Post he believes legalizing the world’s oldest profession will protect both sex workers and their clients.

“It’s a possibility to step out of the black market and [for prostitutes] to include themselves in the standard business regime” he said. “Regulating prostitution and embedding it in the legal system would give more effective tools so the scene would not be as uncontrolled as it is now.”

Under the Prague ordinance, anyone 18 or older may apply for an annual trade certificate after being cleared during a health screening. Brothels must be licensed, as well. Although street prostitution would not be condoned, it would become a misdemeanor if the new law goes into effect.

Brothel workers generally support the idea, but an organization that represents sex workers doesn’t believe the law goes far enough to remove stigma from women who work in the industry. Many prostitutes may refuse to register because public censure.

“Although [the law] represents a certain shift from repression toward business regulation, the proposal still contains excessively repressive elements reflecting the negative attitude toward persons providing paid sexual services,” Hana Malínová, director of Bliss Without Risk, told The Prague Post. “Whether we call these women prostitutes or female sex workers, the work in this business is still stigmatizing. Most women will continue to prevent their names from being published, which is what this official registration represents.

“Nowhere, not even in Austria or Holland, has the number of women registered exceeded 10 percent,” she added.

Among other European nations, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria decriminalized and began to regulate prostitution some time ago. In Sweden, prostitution remains a crime but only the clients, not the prostitutes, are prosecuted.

If the Czech Republic withdraws from the UN Convention for the Suppression in the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, it will join Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States as non-signatories.