A/HRC/4/34 page 12 formally recognized that violence against women constitutes a form of gender discrimination that impairs or nullifies women’s enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms under international law.15 The Committee has also stated that traditional, religious or cultural practice cannot justify violations of the Convention.16 This means that States parties violate their obligations under article 2 of the Convention whenever they either (i) fail to condemn any specific form of violence against women; or (ii) fail to pursue, by all appropriate means and without delay, a policy to eliminate such violence, regardless of whether the violence is grounded in traditional, religious or cultural practice. 29. After decades of women’s advocacy and lobbying, in 1993 the General Assembly finally adopted, by consensus, a comprehensive Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (the Declaration). The Declaration specifies State obligations that emerge from the human rights to life, liberty and security of the person, freedom from torture, the rights to health, equality and non-discrimination and others that are laid down in binding human rights treaties and form part of customary international law. Under article 4 of the Declaration States are required to condemn violence against women and should not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination. They have to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating violence against women, which entails adopting all appropriate measures, especially in the field of education, to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women and to eliminate prejudices, customary practices and all other practices based on inequality, ideologies of inequality or gender stereotypes. 30. These norms establish the primacy of women’s right to live a life free of gender-based violence. States cannot invoke any cultural discourses, including notions of custom, tradition or religion, to justify or condone violence against women. This also means that they may not deny, trivialize or otherwise play down the harm caused by such violence by referring to these notions. Instead, States are expressly required to condemn such violence, which entails denouncing any cultural discourse put forward to justify it. For this reason, senior government officials who remain silent when significant sectors of their own population justify certain types of violence against women with reference to culture incur responsibility for a human rights violation. 31. States also have to take active measures to eradicate violence against women committed with reference to culture that go beyond merely criminalizing and prosecuting the violence itself. Instead, they have to identify those aspects of a given culture which are linked to the violent practice and are required to develop a comprehensive strategy to transform those aspects. 15 See Report of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ibid., Forty-seventh Session, Supplement No. 38 (A/47/38), chap. I, paras. 6 and 7. 16 See note 13 above, para. 17.