Mgbako introduces readers to a diverse cast of women, men, and transgender people in the African sex industry who “support their families and pay their rent.” None of these individuals need rescuing from their work, as anti-prostitution advocates have suggested, but rather realization of their human rights, Mgbako argues. In her narrative, these workers are activists fighting to end the criminalization of sex work, which often leaves them bereft of justice, health care, and labor protection.

“The heart of the book is their stories, their understanding of their work, and their understanding of the human rights abuses” committed against them, Mgbako said of her debut, shaped from 160 interviews with sex workers she conducted across seven African countries. “It was important to me that the communities I was writing about felt the book was needed, could be helpful in their activism, and that I was writing in solidarity with them.”

The book stems from Mgbako’s work as Clinical Professor and Director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School. She has worked with sex workers for nine years, the last three of which she also spent researching and writing the book.

Moralism weighs heavily on the discussion about sex workers and often silences their voices, Mgbako said, but her interviews with activists made it clear their struggle is for labor rights, access to healthcare, and freedom from violence and discrimination. Without decriminalization, such rights are not available. For instance, in many countries police frequently do not take sex workers seriously when they report a crime. More egregiously, police are many times perpetrators of violence toward the workers.

The narrative of To Live Freely In This World is important, Mgbako explained, “to capture the devastating human rights abuses sex workers are facing” and the stigmatization they face due to criminalization. The book also spotlights the grassroots activities of the movement: activists protesting on the street for their rights, going to parliament demanding change, handing out condoms, and providing legal assistance and health care services to people in the industry.

These examples, Mgbako said, combine to show the movement’s “vibrancy and beauty.” The book also includes photos of the diverse sex workers who were interviewed in order to make their stories more accessible. Because of the disproportionate number of LGBT people within the African sex industry, especially transgender women, the fight for sex worker rights intersects with the fight for LGBT rights in Africa, Mgbako said, though it is an intersecting struggle that does not receive much attention.

The book’s publication comes at a time when major global human rights and health organizations such as Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, and UNAIDS have announced support of efforts to decriminalize sex work. Backed by these encouraging developments, Mgbako will continue her own activism to work in solidarity with more sex workers fighting for their rights.

This semester, she and a group of students from the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice performed a human rights training workshop in Mauritius for African sex worker activists from throughout the continent. Next semester, she will work with many of the activists featured in the book to write human rights petitions, including one to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

“I hope the book helps center the discussion of sex work on the lived experiences of sex workers within the industry in Africa and throughout the world fighting for their human rights,” Mgbako said.

To Live Freely In This World is available on the NYU Press website now and on Amazon beginning Jan. 8. On Jan. 26, the Leitner Center will host a book launch.

–Ray Legendre

She was touring the country as a U.N. investigator, and it didn’t take long for the reality to emerge: Haitians were being forced into an undocumented, poverty-stricken underclass because of racial discrimination that was “quite alarming.”

“There was [a sense]that Haitians were not fully human beings,” said McDougall, Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Fordham Law School’s Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.

She describes this and other experiences in a new book, The First United Nations Mandate on Minority Issues (Brill Nijhoff, 2015), about her six years of investigating the oppression of minority communities worldwide.

McDougall served as first U.N. Independent Expert on Minority Issues, a job created in 2005 to help implement the U.N. General Assembly’s Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, adopted in 1992. She reported on the problems facing Macedonian and Pomak communities in Bulgaria, people of African descent in Colombia, the Roma in Bulgaria and Greece, and other minority groups during visits to 17 countries.

But her position was ill-defined from the start. Unlike the United Nations’ independent experts in other areas, McDougall had a limited job description that was silent on whether she could travel to countries and investigate complaints. So she interpreted this silence as permission, embarking on country visits that created a precedent for her successors while also strengthening and clarifying the language of the U.N. minority rights declaration.

“This is the whole point about documenting the first mandate, because the mandate became more than simply words on a piece of paper” during her tenure, she said.

The book describes her findings in various countries as well as some of the possibilities and challenges that come with the job. She met plenty of resistance—like the “diplomatic ‘no’” some countries gave when she asked to visit, or the obfuscation that was apparent in her interviews with government officials at all levels in the Dominican Republic.

“They said the exact same thing” in denying any problem with racism, McDougall said. But her other interviews showed institutionalized discrimination that kept Dominicans of Haitian descent from registering their children as citizens, shutting the children out of schooling and health care and, later in life, legitimate work.

“Since they don’t have the proper papers, they are ripe for exploitation in terms of their labor,” McDougall said, recalling one destitute Haitian community at the end of an unpaved road that struggled to survive on the income from seasonal work at area plantations.

“They have no electricity, they have no plumbing system, they have no school, they have no health system, they can’t get out of there,” McDougall said. “Some were born there, and many will die there without any kind of support. It was a very outrageous system.”

When she and a colleague presented their findings to a government minister in advance of a press conference, the minister “went berserk” with denunciations of their motives.

“I don’t think I went to any country where they were extremely happy about my findings,” McDougall said, unflappably.

Ideally, such findings can be used to bring international pressure or spur countries to address simmering problems within their borders. In another one of her trips, to the ghettos outside Paris, she found discrimination against minorities that kept them from getting even the relatively low-skilled jobs in the French gendarmerie, or police force.

The predictions in her report were borne out by the riots that occurred a few years later.

“Many told me they played by the rules, all the rules, and they are still rejected—for jobs, for basic services,” she said. “People will accept that kind of treatment only for so long.”

The research was compiled by a Fordham Law delegation: Professors Jeanmarie Fenrich, Paolo Galizzi and Chi Mgbako; Jorge Contesse, the 2007-08 Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights; eight second-year law students and an assistant. The group went to several towns in New Zealand to meet with lawyers, judges, legislators, members of government and ordinary citizens, among others.

Contesse appeared on TV New Zealand on April 14 to present the report’s findings. Read more about the report on the Leitner Center’s website “and see Contesse’s interview here, where he says “universal human rights do not only apply to third-world countries.”