Macedonia: Partnership in Action - Skopje using video to protect sex workers

HOPS, which works to protect and promote the rights of sex workers, started partnership with WITNES (www.witness.org), human rights organization (based in New York but working globally), who uses and promotes video activism as an effective and supportive tool for promotion of rights of different groups within ongoing human rights campaigns. Concrete partnership between HOPS and WITNESS includes support in developing video advocacy plan about integrating video in this year’s 17th December campaign.

Video will speak about violence that sex workers are facing and its influence on their everyday life, family etc, and will have appeal to the police to recognize sex workers rights as human rights and to implement the principles of equality and non discrimination when dealing with sex workers. WITNESS staffers, Ryan Kautz and Violeta Krasnic started to make interviews with sex workers and also, with Marija Tosheva, HOPS Program Director, about the recent raids against sex workers. How the training was going, what they learnt, what techniques they decided to use for concealing identities and more about the concrete video you can see here:

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Quotes of the Month

"We went about it with joy and good humor, if you will, we played on the fact that we were police officers, we negotiated prices by saying: How much is it for the police? Where do you come from? What is your age?"… "Most of the time, we were under the effect of alcohol, under the effect of the group. It was known about and tolerated by the hierarchy."

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One of the seven French police officers

Picture of the Month

Odyseus, Slovakia 2009





OSI Public Health Program