On March 8, International Women’s Day, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) released a “set of legal principles” prepared in concert the United Nations which went viral over the weekend as astute observers noted that the document appeared to call for the abolition of laws criminalizing “consensual sex” with children.
To be clear: many right-wing commentators inaccurately described the document as a statement by the United Nations instead of an ICJ publication, but – in all fairness – the initiative began as an “expert meeting” of the ICJ with the the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Subsequently, the principles were drafted over a series of years “a wide range of expert jurists, academics, legal practitioners, human rights defenders and various civil society organizations.” Some left-wing actors took advantage of the confusion to falsely “debunk” the controversy.
The UN has just released a report calling on member states to decriminalise sex with minors. No forms of "consensual sexual conduct" should be criminalised, it says, before noting that minors of any age below 18 can consent to sex with persons of any age. pic.twitter.com/B3qE94Ij6A
— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) April 18, 2023
The controversial section reads:
Consensual sexual conduct, irrespective of the type of sexual activity, the sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression of the people involved or their marital status, may not be criminalized in any circumstances. Consensual same-sex, as well as consensual different-sex sexual relations, or consensual sexual relations with or between trans, non-binary and other gender-diverse people, or outside marriage – whether pre-marital or extramarital – may, therefore, never be criminalized.
With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage.
Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them. Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.
To roughly translate from the academic jargon into layman’s terms, the ICJ argues:
1) All consensual sex should be legalized. This applies to every situation and combination of genders, as well as outside of marriage.
2) Age of consent laws should treat gays and straights equally. In other words, a straight man having sex with a young girl should be treated the same as a gay man having sex with a young boy. The rules should also still be enforced if the participants are married so, in a state where the age of marriage is lower than the age of consent, the age of consent should apply regardless.
3) Sex with children under the age of consent may be consensual practically speaking, even if it’s illegal. When deciding whether to prosecute someone who has sex with a child, the government should consider the maturity of the child, the right of the child to choose to have sex and the right of the child to be taken seriously when they say the sex was consensual. Because children get more mature as they get older, children under the age of 18 should have a say in decisions that affect them, as long as the government takes into consideration their age, maturity and “best interests”. Also, the government should specifically make sure to not discriminate between gays and straights who have sex with children.
A charitable reading of the text is in line with mainstream Western secular beliefs that adults who have sex with children should be prosecuted, but teenagers who have sex with teenagers should be shown leniency. However, the “principle” contains loopholes that could accommodate a train filled with child molesters.
Cover page of ICJ’s March 8 principles statement.
As is common knowledge among anti-child-abuse advocates, the vast majority of child sex abuse victims believe unswervingly that their “relationships” with their abusers are consensual. Likewise, vanishingly few child molesters fail to claim that their victims were willing and enthusiastic sexual partners, if not the initiators themselves. Finally, there is the terrible cliché endemic to the most flagrantly immature sexually active teenagers that they’re “mature for their age”.
Notably, the relevant portion of the text speaks entirely about the age and maturity of the child, but not the other sexual partner. Most people would see a moral difference between a teenager having sex with a 14-year-old versus a 40-year-old, but the document seems to consider all sexual choices of the child valid if there is sufficient “maturity”. While one might forgive this lapse as a careless oversight, this statement of “principles” was painstakingly developed by a team of dozens of lawyers over the last five years.
For anyone who doubts that governments might take these recommendations too close to heart, the Rotherham Rape Scandal should serve as a potent case study to the contrary. Over the course of three decades, at least 1,400 girls – overwhelmingly white, working class children between the ages of 12-14 – were serially raped and trafficked (some even murdered) by Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham, a large town in Northern England. Local authorities, for fear of “being labelled a racist”, allowed the abuse to continue by clinging to the rationale that these exploited children were willing prostitutes and the government had no business interfering with their “choices”.
Even after the story started to break, authorities and media relentlessly confused the public by identifying the perpetrators as “Asian” while neglecting to specify that they were nearly all Pakistani Muslims, prompting furious protests from the UK Hindu Council and Sikh Federation.
The Rotherham story initially broke in British daily The Times in January, 2011. Since then, dozens of grooming gang rapists have been convicted. The latest prosecutions were announced on 29 March, just 21 days after the ICJ’s statement was released.
This isn’t the first time the United Nations has landed in hot water over their handling of child sex abuse. In 2017, an AP investigation revealed that UN Peacekeepers had raped thousands of women across the world and, in the most egregious example, a child sex ring was operated by Peacekeepers in Haiti for ten years with no punishment for the perpetrators. A contemporary Canadian investigation found “glaring gaps” in their procedures for tackling rape and child molestation by UN personnel.
The content of the ICJ’s document concerning child sex is not the only controversial portion, and it features a number of other jaw-dropping far-left legal positions peppered with intersectional Marxian academic jargon in addition to dense legalese. The “March 8 Principles” argue:
- For abolition or curtailment of laws against truancy, defamation, libel, public nuisance, loitering, vagrancy, obscenity, “certain kinds” of pornography, illegal border-crossing and – quite vaguely – “certain harmful practices”, to the extent that they are applied overbroadly.
- For recognizing an absolute human right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy and at any age. This includes any conduct that could harm an unborn baby, such as alcohol and drug abuse.
- For recognizing an absolute human right to “gender-affirming” – or “sex-change” – drugs and surgery at any age.
- Against the criminalization of prostitution. They continue to specify that there should be no criminalization of pimping, either.
- Against the criminalization of infecting another with HIV, unless intent to infect is proven.
- Against the criminalization of all drug use and all drug paraphernalia, “including by anyone under the age of 18 or while pregnant”. This includes the facilitation of drug use and distribution of drug paraphernalia by third parties.
- Against the criminalization of panhandling, as well as urinating, defecating, bathing and sleeping in public.
Nominally a human rights organization from the start, the ICJ was originally founded in 1952 as a front group for the CIA to counter the influence of the Soviet-aligned International Association of Democratic Lawyers. When the CIA funding was revealed in 1967, to the shock of many in the organization who were not aware, the organization attempted to distance itself from the CIA by garnering funding from the Ford Foundation, which was itself also secretly working with the CIA.
Since then, the organization has largely supported left-wing causes, foreign policy causes that align with European interests and LGBT advocacy. The recent articles on their website primarily feature criticisms of non-Western-aligned states, with the notable exception of Israel – which the ICJ accuses of “apartheid”. In one very surprising post for a globalist institution, they argue that the United Nation’s plans for a “Pandemic Treaty” are woefully lacking in recognition of basic human rights and civil liberties, citing “largescale, and well-documented violations of human rights during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
