The first Avicenna Award will be given to the Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) which was founded in 2005 upon the initiative of the Spanish and Turkish governments and under the auspices of the United Nations.

Honorable mention will be made of the initiators of the AoC at the awards presentation, the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. With this prize an organization will be honored which outstandingly reflects the objectives of the Avicenna Award.

The goal of this initiative is to develop common courses of action between the various societies and cultures, to overcome religious and social barriers, mainly between Orient and Occident, and to combat extremism. The former Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio has been UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations since April 2007.

For more information, please see http://www.unaoc.org.