SC: Sex Workers Too Have A Right To Live

 India Legal News :  Not only commercial sex workers and/or prostitutes, the Supreme Court has directed the central and all the state governments of India to prepare comprehensive rehabilitation schemes for physically and sexually abused women. A Bench of Justices Markandey Katju and Gyan Sudha Misra on Monday gave orders to prepare schemes for providing technical/vocational training for sex workers and abused women across India.

The honorable judge cited the ‘right to live’ with dignity under Article 21 [right to life] mentioned in the Constitution. The directive came as the Bench dismissed an appeal filed by one Budhadev Karmaskar against a Calcutta High Court judgment upholding life imprisonment awarded by a trial court for the murder of a commercial sex worker in September, 1999 in Kolkata. The bench added, “A woman is compelled to indulge in prostitution not for pleasure but because of abject poverty. If such a woman is granted an opportunity to avail herself of some technical or vocational training, she would be able to earn her livelihood by such vocational training and skill instead of by selling her body.”