A/HRC/4/34 page 16 People would entail and they could prove to be counterproductive for indigenous peoples’ rights in the long run. Ultimately, indigenous peoples’ struggle for social justice on a human rights platform will only be legitimate, and therefore successful, if human rights problems within the community, in particular violence and discrimination against women, are also acknowledged and addressed. Regional frameworks 40. Women’s rights, including the primacy right to a life free from gender-based violence, have also been challenged through regional frameworks using rights terminology. An example is the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted in Cairo on 5 August 1990 at the Nineteenth Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers. Noting that all human beings form one family whose members are descendants of Adam (with no mention of Eve), the Cairo Declaration states, with rather deliberate ambiguity, that “all men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities” (my emphasis) without any discrimination on the grounds of, inter alia, sex. According to article 6, “woman is equal to man in human dignity”, but the same article also asserts that “the husband is responsible for the maintenance and welfare of the family”. With regard to violence against women specifically, it is to be noted that Declaration considers that only men have the “right, within the framework of the Shari’ah, of free movement” and that it is prohibited to breach the right to safety from bodily harm “without a Shari’ah-prescribed reason”. Similarly, the 1993 Bangkok Declaration, which builds on the “Asian values” debate, adopts an alternative vision of rights that challenges the universal validity of international human rights law. 41. It is obvious that these regional normative frameworks are incoherent with the universal framework that has legal precedence over them. More striking, however, is that such discourses ironically serve to reinforce the encroachments stemming from orientalist thinking that they inherently aim to counter. C. Cultural relativism and women’s human rights 1. Difference or domination 42. Since the inception of human rights, their universality and their validity in a given local context have been continuously contested through relativist discourses that brand them as external (usually Western) impositions that are incompatible with local culture. Such claims have provided reference points for judicial systems in excusing acts of violence against women or have helped sustain parallel justice systems that hand down severe forms of punishment to women presumed to have transgressed social norms. 43. In most of the developing world, the history of colonial oppression and the existence of authoritarian political regimes as well as the economic and political polarizations between the North and the South provide fertile ground for a cultural relativist stand that has emphasized respect for differences between cultures vis-à-vis the discursive universalistic strategy of the international human rights framework. Underlying this emphasis on cultural difference is a