The court made its decision after the owner of a strip club, along with two members of staff of that establishment, had been charged with pimping.

According to the charge sheet, dancers working at the club had offered sexual services for payment, under the guise of a private striptease and massage service which had the purpose of sexually arousing clients.

No full sexual intercourse had taken place during these activities. Both the first-tier county court and the second-tier circuit court had found that the defendants had engaged in pimping. However, the Supreme Court acquitted the defendants.

Under the Penal Code, pimping is a punishable offense in Estonia, where it means mediating prostitution, facilitating or inciting prostitution, or owning or managing an establishment involved in prostitution. At the same time, current law does not define the concept of prostitution, nor is it expressly explained in other legislation.

The prosecution in the recent case considered prostitution to mean paid sexual companionship involving either sexual intercourse or other acts of a sexual nature. The county court and the circuit court attempted to define prostitution via precedent in sexual offense cases and via legal scholarship.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court explained that this approach amounted to an impermissible expansion of the scope of punishable acts when, in addition to paid sexual intercourse, other acts of a sexual nature were also classified as prostitution. Moreover, sexual offenses primarily refer to acts of sexual assault and are inherently unsuitable in defining prostitution, the top court found.

While pimping is punishable partly in order to protect the self-determination of a person providing sexual services, it is not, at least directly, connected to the use of coercion or violence.

Forcing someone into prostitution, non-consensual sexual violence, and exploiting a victim's helplessness or minority status can give rise to liability under other provisions of the law.

For this reason, the need to better protect victims cannot justify an expansive interpretation of the concept of prostitution, the Supreme Court ruled.

The Supreme Court noted that, in ordinary language, prostitution means selling one's body for sexual intercourse or making money through sex. Sexual intercourse, in turn, is typically understood to mean intercourse in its various forms. Consequently, only actual sexual intercourse performed in exchange for payment can be regarded as prostitution.

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