At a ceremony held on December 19 in Vienna, Austria, Professor İhsan Doğramacı, the President of Bilkent University and the Chairman of its Board of Trustees, was awarded the Council of Europe Prize for Tolerance together with co-awardees Simon Wiesenthal, who received the Prize for Justice, and Franz Cardinal König, who received the Prize for Peace. The latter two are both citizens of Austria. The occasion was the Wiesenthal Conference on Sources of Hate, held from December 17 to 19 in honor of the 90th birthday of Mr. Wiesenthal. The event was held under the auspices of the Austrian Government and the City of Vienna and under the aegis of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

The three-day conference was opened by the President of Austria, Thomas Klestil, and the Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Austria, Wolfgang Schüssel. The President of Germany, Roman Herzog, was the keynote speaker at the Award Ceremony.

Discussions during the conference were devoted to the causes and sources of hatred, with speakers invited from Europe, North America, and Israel to cover the sub-topics of The Ambivalence of Religion and Humanism and The Ambivalence of the Sciences. Hatred was treated as a social problem, not the hatred of individuals for one another, but rather the reasons that human beings make others representatives of a hated group - Blacks, Huns, Jews, the Rich, Unbelievers. Those reasons were sought above all in our heads, in the concepts and conceptual systems with which human beings interpret the world. The conference was organized with the hope that clarifying the sources of hatred would help to reduce hate itself.