Terri jean bedford biography of williams

In the Bedford"' case, the appellants, Terri Jean Bedford, Valerie Scott, and Amy Lebovitch, challenged the constitutionality of Canada’s prostitution laws under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. The argument in Bedford essentially centred on how the prostitution laws made sex work more dangerous for sex workers,^[1] which violated their right to security of the person. The appellants’ arguments in the case were narrowly focused on this Charter right, and they themselves did not pursue any kind of argument on dignity grounds.

While the appellants did not pursue dignity-based arguments, the concept was, however, deployed by the state and national governments, who were, of course, arguing that the prostitution laws were compatible with the Canadian

Charter. The dignity-based arguments, while taking slightly different forms for each of the provisions being challenged, were effectively all predicated on the notion that prostitution was intrinsically incompatible with human dignity. Before the Supreme Court, the Attorney General of Canada put forward the argument that the objective of the laws against living on the avails of prostitution was “... to promote the values of dignity and equality”.^[2] A similar argument was advanced by the representatives of the Attorney General for Ontario, before the Ontario Court of Appeal, when they claimed that the bawdyhouse law and law against communicating in public spaces for the purposes of prostitution had, as their ultimate goal, the promotion of “core societal values, such as human dignity and equality”.^[3] These arguments are examples of Rao’s ‘substantive conceptions’, in which the criminalisation of activities associated with prostitution are justified on the grounds that commercial sex conflicts with the substantive values of the community.

At the first-instance hearing, the dignity arguments advanced by the government lawyers took a slightly different form and were more an example of ‘intrinsic dignity’, as the dignity of the individuals involved in sex work was the focus rather than dignity as a substantive value. Before Justice Susan Himel in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Attorney General of Ontario argued that “all sexual gratification in exchange for payment is inconsistent with respect for the human dignity of the seller of sexual services”.^[4] This is an example of ‘intrinsic dignity’ because the focus is placed on the personal dignity of the sex worker. In the same way that Justice Lamer in the Prostitution Reference case did, the Attorney General of Ontario frames commercial sex as invariably an experience of harm and exploitation.^[5]

Despite all the ‘substantive conceptions’-based arguments that were advanced before the higher courts in Bedford, it is interesting to note that they did not accept any of them as a justification for the prostitution laws. The Ontario Court of Appeal, for example, found that the bawdyhouse law was concerned with “nuisance and affront to public decency, not modern objectives of dignity and equality”.^[6] The Supreme Court reached the conclusion that Canada’s prostitution laws did, in fact, expose sex workers to significant danger and, therefore, breached their rights under section 7 of the Charter, rejecting the notion that the laws helped to promote dignity. They provided the government with one year in which to reform the laws before striking them down. The government, after a public consultation process, adopted the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act 2014, which is based on the Nordic model of criminalising the buyer of sex and decriminalising the seller. The Preamble to the new law contains a provision noting that “it is important to protect human dignity and the equality of all Canadians by discouraging prostitution, which has a disproportionate impact on women and children”. This echoes the arguments made by the government lawyers at every stage of the Bedford case and is, yet again, an example of ‘substantive conceptions’. The prohibition on purchasing sex is justified on the grounds of protecting the human dignity of the entire society of Canadians. Across the Pacific Ocean, in South Korea, their Constitutional Court was also deeply concerned about the impact of prostitution on South Korean society, in the Kim Jeong-Mi case.