Using drugs or alcohol while pregnant is not a crime, and neither is sex with a minor or defecating on a public sidewalk, according to a recent United Nations report that seeks to globally decriminalize a host of behaviors related to sex, HIV, gender expression, drug possession and use, homelessness, and poverty.
The report, written by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), says these and other behaviors are a matter of human rights, and criminalizing them is harmful to those who engage in such activities, by placing a social stigma on them.
“From long years in the law, and as a proudly gay man, I know profoundly how criminal law signals which groups are deemed worthy of protection—and which of condemnation and ostracism,” Edwin Cameron, retired justice for the Constitutional Court of South Africa wrote in the report’s forward….