A/HRC/35/29 operationalized. A good law requires a fully ameliorating environment in which it can be meaningfully implemented. No matter how strongly the law is drafted, it is filtered through the biases and limitations of the individuals and institutions, public and private, responsible for grounding it in reality, compounded by a social environment that disadvantages women through the perpetuation of historical discrimination, the patriarchal construction of gender and the perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudices. These factors must be considered closely when identifying which laws have become good practices. 21. The question of how to identify good practices in ending discrimination against women is particularly poignant at this historical juncture, where a profound backlash against hard-won progress is occurring in all spheres. The continuing rise of fundamentalisms of all kinds and openly misogynistic, racist, xenophobic and populist voices, including Governments, is of grave concern to the Working Group. Efforts to reentrench patriarchal understandings of sex, gender and family into the law point to important questions about sustaining progress and ensuring that good practices continue to be possible in fraught contexts. Ongoing attacks on autonomous women’s movements, civil society organizations, independent academia, public interest lawyers and women’s human rights defenders by State and non-State actors alike underscore the importance of not only protecting and supporting the crucial role of women human rights defenders, but also identifying those good practices which uphold human rights gains. 22. Naming a “good practice” is a complex process. The purpose of investigating and sharing good practices is to help build collective knowledge and public recognition of the steps and processes States must undertake to fulfil their obligations under international human rights law. States’ duty to respect, protect and fulfil women’s human rights are requirements of human rights law. Good practices illustrate the ways and means to implement human rights most effectively in diverse contexts. When good practices are viewed in isolation from the breadth of actions and actors involved in processes of social change, they can lose their power as a source of learning and fail to enhance collective knowledge of what it takes to bring human rights principles into reality. 23. The Working Group stresses that human rights are universal while recognizing that good practices must reflect the multiple contexts of diverse stakeholders. Frameworks of analysis thus require flexibility and creativity to capture the full complexity of any practice, including both its successes and shortcomings. This emphasis on context also requires a robust consideration of current challenges to human rights implementation on a global, regional, national and local scale. This contextualized consideration of challenges and search for good practices in no way derogates from the assertion in the Vienna Declaration that women’s rights are human rights and “all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated”. 24. The Working Group found that many examples cited as good practices in law did not show the process by which they were established, or the many factors and diverse actors that enabled the practice to come into being. In the present report, the Group undertakes to focus on the process of developing the ways and means to implement women’s right to equality. To understand what is required to support gender equality from a holistic approach, both quantitative and qualitative data are equally necessary, and, given the long-term process of social change, an historical perspective is important. 25. Given these complexities, the Working Group proposes a methodology for identifying good practices by investigating partial and substantial victories in the realization of women’s human rights with a view to decoding the full breadth of actors, initiatives and milestones required to fully implement State obligations under international human rights law. Rather than making generalizations about indicators of good practice, the Group’s research process focused on investigating and documenting promising and good practices in all regions of the world by applying a living-law approach. 26. The living-law approach looks at laws beyond the text of a legislation or judicial decision, including the dynamic processes by which that law comes into being, is implemented meaningfully and contributes to real and sustainable outcomes for women’s de facto enjoyment of human rights. Thus, a living-law approach involves understanding laws in the context of dynamic and sustained processes situated in local social, political, 6