NEW YORK, June 24, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation today announces that it will award the 2009 Gruber Women's Rights Prize to an individual and an organization that have brought about significant advances in the quest for peace and gender equality in Africa:
* Leymah Roberta Gbowee -- executive director of Women in Peace and Security Network - Africa, a peacebuilding organization that acts to build relationships in West Africa to support women's efforts to prevent, avert, and end conflicts. Ms. Gbowee was instrumental in bringing about an end to civil war in Liberia and getting women's groups represented in negotiations and demilitarization efforts. At great personal risk, she worked with colleagues to break the power grip of dictators and warlords, culminating in the first democratic election of a female head of state anywhere in Africa. * Women's Legal Centre (WLC) -- a nonprofit law center based in South Africa that seeks to achieve equality for women -- and black women in particular -- through litigation, the provision of free legal advice, the support of advocacy campaigns by gender-based and other organizations, and the delivery of training to explain the impact of court decisions on women's rights. WLC has expanded the rights of women through successful court challenges of discriminatory laws and has helped to place stricter obligations on employers' duty to eliminate sexual harassment from the workplace.
The Women's Rights Prize of The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation is presented to an individual or group that has made significant contributions, often at great personal or professional risk, to furthering the rights of women and girls in any area and to advancing public awareness of the need for gender equality to achieve a just world. The 2009 Gruber Women's Rights Prize will be awarded in a ceremony this fall celebrating the achievements of the recipients, who will share the $500,000 prize. In addition to the cash award, Ms. Gbowee and the Women's Legal Centre will each receive a gold medal.
"Both Leymah Gbowee and the Women's Legal Centre have challenged deeply entrenched power structures and cultural biases and, through their fearless commitment to change, achieved remarkable results," says Judge Akua Kuenyehia, International Criminal Court. "Ms. Gbowee has succeeded in mobilizing women in her country from different religious and cultural backgrounds into a highly effective force for peace in the region. The Women's Legal Centre has won for women in South Africa basic rights in many areas, including inheritance and property ownership, as well as labor practices. Both recipients play a critically important role in redefining, in a very positive way, the status of African women in the 21st century."
Based in Accra, Ghana, Leymah Roberta Gbowee has been executive director of Women in Peace and Security Network - Africa (WIPSEN - Africa) since 2006. The organization works with women in Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone to create positive change through peace activism, literacy, and electoral politics. Since 2004 she has served as the commissioner-designate of the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Gbowee is a founding member and former coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Program/West African Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). During her tenure with that organization, she organized collaborative peacebuilding initiatives for women peace builders from 9 of Liberia's 15 counties. She helped bring an end to a seemingly intractable civil war by mobilizing Christian and Muslim women in a collaborative resistance movement that was able, through sit-ins and other acts of resistance, to get President Charles Taylor to meet with rebel groups at the peace table in Ghana and eventually agree to peace terms. In the period following the war, that movement played an important role in demilitarization efforts and in providing valuable support to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in her successful campaign to become president of Liberia and the first elected female head of state in Africa. The story of Gbowee and her peacebuilding network is told in an award-winning documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Gbowee has received the Blue Ribbon for Peace from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a "Leaders for the 21st Century" Award from Women's eNews. She holds an M.A. in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Women's Legal Centre (WLC), located in Cape Town, South Africa, is focusing on five strategic areas in the 2008-10 timeframe: violence against women, fair access to resources in relationships, access to land/housing, access to fair labor practices, and access to health (particularly reproductive health). Underlying the plight of many African women is the existence of a dual legal system that includes laws that have historically governed matters such as marriage and the ownership of property, as well as civil law introduced by colonial powers. WLC seeks to incorporate a rights-based system into African culture. Since its founding in 1998, it has successfully challenged primogeniture rules, thus enabling a female to inherit from her father; discriminatory provisions of law relating to intestate succession, enabling a woman to inherit from her spouse in both monogamous and polygynous Islamic marriages; provisions preventing a woman from claiming damages when injured by the actions of her spouse in a motor vehicle accident; discriminatory remnants in the law that precluded a woman in a polygymous marriage from claiming loss of support when her husband died; and provisions in the law preventing a survivor of child abuse from claiming damages. WLC also helped to place stricter obligations on employers to keep discrimination in the form of sexual harassment out of the workplace. The organization has made significant progress in developing the state's duty of care in enforcing a woman's right to be free from violence and has participated in successfully defending legal challenges to the right to reproductive healthcare.
The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Prize Program honors contemporary individuals in the fields of Cosmology, Genetics, Neuroscience, Justice and Women's Rights, whose groundbreaking work provides new models that inspire and enable fundamental shifts in knowledge and culture. The Selection Advisory Boards choose individuals whose contributions in their respective fields advance our knowledge, potentially have a profound impact on our lives, and, in the case of the Justice and Women's Rights Prizes, demonstrate courage and commitment in the face of significant obstacles.
For more information about The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Prize Program, please visit www.gruberprizes.org.
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