A/HRC/4/34 page 25 D. Conclusions 67. Cultures, including the universal human rights culture, are contested sites. Historically, women, individually and collectively, in the Global North and in the South have actively resisted and negotiated oppressive cultural practices. The interconnectedness of local resistance movements evolved into an international women’s movement which succeeded in transforming the international human rights law to address the specific ways in which violation of women’s rights occur. This culminated in a comprehensive agenda that recognizes violence against women as a human rights violation that must be condemned regardless of whether the violence is grounded in traditional, religious or cultural practices. 68. However, despite the fact that the international community has recognized the universality of rights, identity politics and cultural relativist paradigms are increasingly employed to constrain in particular the rights of women. Essentialized interpretations of culture are used either to justify violation of women’s rights in the name of culture or to categorically condemn cultures “out there” as being inherently primitive and violent towards women. Both variants of cultural essentialism ignore the universal dimensions of patriarchal culture that subordinates, albeit differently, women in all societies and fails to recognize women’s active agency in resisting and negotiating culture to improve their terms of existence. 69. Making culture the divisor of rights and singling out specific practices as the only culturally sanctioned form of violence that deserves to be denounced or defended inherently de-links violence against women from its root causes and fragments and complicates the struggles against gender-based violence, particularly for women in the South whose salvation becomes one of denying themselves their own cultural identity. Such a polarized perception of violence against women undermines the universal application of international human rights norms and prevents a scrutiny of domestic culture with respect to human rights implications. 70. This report has argued that cultural essentialism, in its orientalist as well as occidentalist variations, are based on several myths that need to be challenged if we are to move forward in the international human rights agenda in general and the elimination of violence against women in particular. These are: (i) depicting culture as immutable and static; (ii) culture as homogenous; and (iii) culture as apolitical and detached from the material foundation of life. Such myths privilege dominant representations of culture while denying space for alternative voices; they cloud over the material basis of life that underpins cultural claims, thus overlooking the political and economic conditions that sustain the violation of women’s rights. 71. Compromising women’s rights is not an option. Therefore, the challenge that confronts us today is to respect and prize our diverse cultures while developing common strategies to resist oppressive practices in the name of culture, and to promote and uphold universal human rights while rejecting encroachments grounded in ethnocentric thinking.