The Peter & Patricia Gruber Foundation honored Tuesday Pinar Ilkkaracan, one of the leading women's rights advocate in Turkey, with the Women's Rights Prize.

The Women's Rights Prize honors individuals who have made significant contributions to human rights that advance the rights of women and girls around the world.

Ilkkaracan received her prize in a ceremony held at the Law School of New York University.

Pinar Ilkkaracan is a psychotherapist and researcher who, through Women for Women’s New Ways (WWHR) – an organization she founded – and the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Countries (CSBR) – a bi-regional solidarity network she initiated – has pioneered reforms to anchor women’s equality in the legal system, and created a nationwide human rights program to enable women to exercise their rights in Turkey.

She has built a regional network to increase the knowledge, solidarity, and advocacy on bodily integrity and human rights among women and men in Muslim societies. She is also a leading advocate for women’s human rights internationally.

"To stifle even a single segment of a population is to shortchange the whole of humanity; to help liberate that segment is to contribute to universal human progress," the foundation said. "Both individually and through her leadership in two organizations that she co-founded, Pinar Ilkkaracan has helped reform Turkish laws to advance gender equality and made these laws accessible to women at the grassroots level, instigated advocacy efforts to promote sexual, bodily and reproductive rights in Muslim societies, and advocated on the international level for the advancement of women’s human rights."

Women for Women's Human Rights and Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies also received the same prize. Founded in 1993, Women for Women’s Human Rights-New Ways (WWHR) seeks to enable women's active participation as equal citizens in local, national, regional and international processes of social change and undertakes advocacy efforts to promote women’s human rights, gender equality and non-discrimination.

The Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR) was founded in 2001, following the “Women, Sexuality and Social Change in the Middle East and Mediterranean Symposium” organized by WWHR in Istanbul, Turkey. In this groundbreaking meeting, NGO representatives, activists and academicians from the Middle East and North Africa came together for the first time to discuss sexuality in the region and affirmed the need for a solidarity network of those advocating for sexual, reproductive and bodily rights as human rights in the region.

Gruber Foundation's 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 Women's Rights Prize, established in 2003 and awarded annually, is a gold medal and unrestricted cash award of $500,000 that honors courageous efforts to help achieve gender equality.