On the other, women have found it difficult to translate women's experiences into the narrow language of international human rights law. Women generally live their lives in situations where the power relations that define their domination are absolutely complex. In contrast to this reality, human rights conventions assume that all women have similar attributes and experiences and often ignore the impact of class, race, wealth, and sexual preference. This weakness derives from the nature of international law, which necessarily has to concern itself with transnational standards applicable in a vast range of circumstances. Often, women find that the disparity is great between universal standards and local experiences.
Critics also say that western values and structures generally inform international human rights law.
In this sense, it had been a medium for the western distinction to be exported from the developed to the developing world and gave rise to the tendency to replicate reforms imposed by colonial administrators that often weakened the position of women in colonial societies. Competing Rights Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, wrote that human rights discourse is weakened by competition from traditional sources of empowerment. Individual women's human rights come up against the ideology of ethnicity, culture, and tradition. Ethnic, class, and nationalist struggles have strengthened this assertion that has resonated as well in international official conferences. One such conference was the meeting in Indonesia in 1994 to prepare for the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing the following year.