Red Light District, Deventer, Netherlands, Getty Images Signature, Canva Pro

By Taina Bien-Aimé

In its 2016 report to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, or the CEDAW Committee, expressed concern about the highest record of sex trafficking cases in the country since the year 2000. Incidentally – or not – 2000 is when the Dutch government legalized prostitution and lifted the ban on brothels and pimping.

In an earlier report, the Committee had also pressed the Netherlands to assess the acute harm and health hazards related to prostitution and its direct links to human trafficking.

This year, in its concluding observations published in February 2026, the CEDAW Committee, under the chairship of Nahla Haidar, shocked women’s rights defenders and sex trade survivors from around the world by embracing the Netherlands’ ideology that prostitution is a worthwhile job option for migrant and other disenfranchised women.

In response, over 1,400 civil society advocates signed an open letter to the CEDAW Committee, urging it to amend this report to remove the Committee’s defense of the multi-billion-dollar commercial sex industry rather than human rights principles.

Specifically, the global letter asks the Committee to delete all references to “sex work,” a term coined by the sex trade that contravenes international law, and its proposal to further expand the Dutch sex trade.

As it stands, the report calls on the Netherlands to allow “home-based sex work” and to increase the number of brothel licenses. It also complains that the Dutch territory of Curaçao only offers permits to “engage in regulated sex work” to a select few foreign women.

Read the full piece on Substack.