Thai sex-worker organisations have placed their own draft law in front of parliament: repeal the 1996 Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act, and replace criminalisation with labour protections. Empower Foundation submitted a protection bill backed by more than 11,000 signatures. SWING Foundation has separately pushed a repeal proposal with over 14,000 signatures. Neither group is asking the state to promote sex work. They are asking it to stop treating consensual adult work as a crime and to extend the same basic rights other workers already hold.
This reporting is part of the Sex Worker Visibility Project: coverage of how law, labour status, and stigma actually land on people who do the work. If that work is useful to you, support it on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.
The 1996 Act has stood for nearly three decades. Organisers say it has never been updated for social reality: it criminalises the sale of sex between consenting adults, drives the work underground, exposes workers to official extortion and discrimination, and blocks access to ordinary labour-law remedies when pay, safety, or refusal rights are violated. SWING director Surang Chanyaem has argued that the law violates the rights of people who enter the work by choice and that repeal is the first step toward dignity and protection under Thai labour law.
Empower’s draft is explicit about the replacement framework. Entry into sex work would require a consenting adult aged over 18. Seeking the services of a minor would be penalised regardless of claimed consent. Workers would gain rights to appropriate compensation, health benefits, confidentiality, and the right to withhold service. Workplace conflicts would fall under the Labour Court. Establishments would need licences renewed every three years and would have to meet labour-protection standards. A protection committee and access to shelter support are also in the text. Coordinator Tanta Laowilawanyakul has stressed that the bill is not designed to encourage the work but to decriminalise it so that people already doing it receive the same fundamental rights as other occupations.
Process has been the obstacle as much as principle. Empower’s campaign began collecting signatures in March 2025 and filed in May–June 2026. In July, House leadership classified the bill as finance-related, which means it needs the Prime Minister’s approval before full parliamentary consideration. Civil-society groups marched to the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security in September demanding that the ministry push for that approval and that sex workers be included in every step of drafting. An advisor to the minister received the petition and said the ministry had not yet received direction from the Prime Minister’s Office. Parallel ministry and party drafts have been discussed for years; organisers say progress on those has stalled, which is why they filed their own.
First Deputy House Speaker Padipat Suntiphada, receiving SWING’s earlier submission, noted that a House sub-committee is studying legalisation and that the real concerns are public health, the economy, labour, trafficking prevention, child protection, and coercion — not morality alone. He argued for open discussion that does not let moral language erase the people in a profession that deserves the same protection as any other.
Thailand is not unique in this structure. Criminalisation without labour recognition leaves workers outside the systems that handle wages, injury, and dispute resolution, while still exposing them to policing. CEDAW has recommended that Thailand decriminalise sex work and protect labour rights. Empower has cited those recommendations in its ministerial appeals. The counter-argument — that any opening invites trafficking or underage exploitation — is met in the drafts with explicit age thresholds, penalties for buying from minors, and licensing conditions. Whether parliament will debate the text on those terms remains open.
For the Sex Worker Visibility Project, the Thai bills matter because they are written from inside the work. The demand is not abstract legalisation theory. It is a concrete claim: stop making the job a crime, put disputes in labour courts, guarantee the right to refuse, and let adults who choose this work access the same protections the rest of the workforce already has. Signatures are collected. The drafts are filed. The next move belongs to the Prime Minister’s Office and the House.