Friday, December 09, 2005

Prostitution Scandal at USAID

Maybe I missed this when it first came out in September, but it seems worth mentioning that George Soros's Open Society Institute is still suing USAID for requiring grant recipients to sign an anti-prostitution pledge (the case was mentioned at a recent American Enterprise Institute panel on NGOs):
The Open Society Institute, along with its affiliate the Alliance for Open Society International, filed a lawsuit today against USAID to challenge its unconstitutional and dangerous policy of requiring grantees to sign a pledge opposing prostitution. Failure to endorse this loyalty oath means health workers across the world striving to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS could lose funding and be forced to abandon life-saving programs...

...AOSI is administering a government grant awarded in 2002 to implement USAID’s Drug Demand Reduction Program in Central Asia, where HIV/AIDS is spread overwhelmingly through injection drug use and left unchecked will have a devastating social and economic impact. Since sex workers are at increased risk of using drugs, they are a prime target for this program’s interventions.
This is in the context of an October 6, 2005 complaint from Congressman Mark Souder to USAID official James Kunder about a US-funded NGO "called Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM) that had retraffcked women back into a brothel after they had been rescued by a State Department financed group."

In his letter, Souder charged that USAID administrator Andrew Natsios was aware of SANGRAM's record.