Professor Bennoune receives prestigious honor in France

The Comité Laïcité République in France has honored Professor Karima Bennoune with its International Separation of Religion and State (or Secularism) Prize.

Bennoune, the U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, accepted the award at a ceremony in Paris that included the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo. Previous winners of the prize include actress Isabelle Adjani and Saudi human rights advocate Raif Badawi.

Karima Bennoune, Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2014, she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism (W.W. Norton & Company). In October 2015, she was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.  She received the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award from IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.