 Two Global Fund Grantees Among 2008 Gruber Women’s Prize Recipients
Three prominent women's rights activists will share this year’s
$500,000 Gruber Women's Rights Prize. Yanar Mohammed is the co-founder
of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), a Global Fund
grantee that has opened shelters and safe houses for women threatened
by domestic abuse, so-called honor killings from their families, and
sectarian fighting. It also runs a program with women prisoners.
OWFI’s mission includes “building an open-minded social movement to
empower women and reclaim the previous status which women enjoyed in
Iraq.” OWFI is also the publisher of Al Mousawat, the only Iraqi print
publication that calls for full equality for women – an urgent and
important issue especially in the context of the ongoing US occupation
of Iraq that has aggravated violence against women by both armed groups
and religious extremists. Yanar has been a Global Fund official Advisor
for the MENA region since 2005.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist scholar, therapist
and activist, has worked to end violence against Palestinian women,
especially so-called honor killings. She has trained female activists
in the West Bank and Gaza, where she also established a hotline for
reporting abuse. Nadera is a Board Member of Global Fund grantee group
Mada al-Carmel: Arab Center for Applied Social Research, a dynamic
organization based in Israel convenes and trains emerging Palestinian
social scientists, as a strategy to foster links between academics,
activists, and political actors to transform the economic, political,
and social conditions of Palestinian citizens. Nadera co-created the
Gender Studies Project at Mada al-Carmel that seeks to support and
empower researchers to apply Palestinian, critical, postcolonial and
feminist perspectives to the study of Palestinian women’s realities in
Israel.
The third winner of the prize, Sapana Pradhan Malla, is a lawyer and
president of the Forum for Women, Law and Development, fights for legal
reforms to protect women's reproductive rights in Nepal. Malla helped
initiate legislation to criminalize rape in the country. The Women’s
Rights Prize ceremony will take place on November 11 at Columbia Law
school, New York.
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Gruber Women's Rights Prize
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