The benefits of the human rights discourse on behalf of global equality for women cannot be denied. However, it is not a straightforward endeavour. Certainly, advocacy efforts to develop gendered international legal standards, most often framed as human rights protections function positively in a number of ways.

As a rhetorical matter, the appeal to globalized legal standards, particularly in the area of human rights, serves as a harbinger of change and messenger of modernity and progress. Women’s organizations and human rights groups have frequently relied upon legal approaches and rights-based claims. Violence against women is now considered a proper subject for international human rights law.

Indeed, the issue of human rights for women has moved to center stage of the United Nations in terms of programmatic, administrative, and methodological approaches to international relations. But it is more complicated for this process is itself often a microcosm of the larger debate about globalization, specifically the digress to which old paradigms of colonialism are being recreated in the guise of global integration.