(JTA) — The Association for Civil Rights in Israel was awarded the 2011 Gruber Justice Prize.
Libby Lenkinski Friedlander, director of international relations for the organization, will accept the prize, along with the representatives of four other social justice organizations, on Thursday night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The groups will share the $500,000 cash prize.
ACRI received the award for promoting and defending the rights of vulnerable communities in Israel and the occupied territories, according to the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation.
This will be the final Justice Prize awarded by the Gruber Foundation. The mission of the prize will continue at Yale as part of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights.
The program’s core components will be the Global Constitutionalism Seminar, the Gruber Distinguished Global Justice and Women’s Rights Lectures, and the Gruber Global Justice and Women’s Rights Fellowships. The foundation was established in 1993.
The other prize recipients are Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, for defending and promoting civil rights and gender equity throughout the U.S.; Morris Dees, for his work for racial equality, particularly in the southern United States; the Center for Legal and Social Studies, for documenting and litigating human rights violations by the military dictatorship in Argentina; and the Kurdish Human Rights Project, for protecting the civil and religious liberty of peoples in Kurdish regions, including in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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