A/HRC/4/34 page 9 20. Parallel to these trends, there has also been a tendency on the part of some to essentialize traditional cultures of the Global South as inherently harmful to women.6 In this context, human rights law has been perceived as an instrument to eliminate “harmful traditional practices”. Such an approach not only fortifies a superficial duality between modernity and tradition but it also assumes that eliminating the practice on its own will serve to liberate the “victimized women” of these cultures. Furthermore, it overlooks the economic and political underpinnings of women’s subordination and the construction of culture within the dynamics of power relations at local, national and global levels. Cultural essentialism also ignores the agency of women in the developing world and the trajectories of their resistance to violence and oppression. 21. This report aims to address these areas of contestation in order to identify strategies that can contribute to the advancement of the women’s rights agenda in combating violence against women. Firstly, it traces the trends in the development of the international normative framework on violence against women in relation to culture, culminating in the recognition of the primacy of women’s right to live a life free of gender-based violence over any cultural considerations. Secondly, it critically examines how cultural discourses are created, reproduced and instrumentalized to challenge this primacy, and the validity of the principle of gender equality and women’s human rights in general. In doing so, I seek to outline the general parameters of a strategy to counter and transform culture-based discourses in order to overcome one of the major obstacles to the implementation of women’s rights. B. Culture and violence against women in the international human rights framework 1. Universal claims for rights 22. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, which the community of States adopted by consensus, confirms: “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”7 This universality extends naturally also to women’s human rights, which have been solemnly recognized by States as “an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights”.8 23. While the articulation of human rights discourses as individual rights is associated with the intellectual ideas of the Western Enlightenment period, these rights were neither “naturally” embodied norms of Western societies nor the obvious consequences of the linear progress of a 6 Cultural essentialism is a term used to describe the tendency to believe that those who belong to a specific culture exhibit morals, ideas and traits universally. 7 A/CONF.157/24 (Part I), chap. III, preamble. 8 Ibid., part I, para. 18.