Anna-Louise Crago

Anna-Louise Crago has spent over a decade as a human rights activist, a service-provider, and a researcher with, and as part of, sex worker and street-involved communities. She has worked for many years with Stella, Montreal's center by and for sex workers, most recently as the coordinator of services and the legal clinic and medical clinic.  In 2006, Human Rights Watch and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network awarded her and her team members the "AIDS Action Award" for their work. Anna-Louise has also worked for many years on human rights issues for SWAN, a network of 22 groups offering services to sex workers, drug users, and street youth in 19 countries in Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Anna-Louise has researched violence and other human rights violations against sex workers, drug users, and homeless people in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Europe. She coordinated and was the lead author of "Arrest the Violence," a sex worker-led community research project on police raids and violence against sex workers in 11 countries. Human Rights Watch qualified the project as "groundbreaking research" that "might serve as a catalyst to awaken the broader human rights community."

Anna-Louise is a co-guest editor of an upcoming issue of The Lancet on HIV and sex work. She participated as an expert in the development of the World Health Organization's first Guidelines on HIV Prevention, Treatment and Care for Sex Workers in Low and Middle-Income Countries(2012) and in 2011 she addressed the Global Commission on HIV and the Law on the impacts of the criminalization of sex work. She sat on the advisory board of the Open Society Foundations' Sexual Health and Rights Project from 2009 to 2011 and she co-authored a keynote address for the International Aids Conference in Mexico in 2008. Lastly, Anna-Louise obtained a bachelor's and a master's degree from Concordia University.