Harriet Agerholm sat down with The Guardian‘s migration correspondent and author Patrick Kingsley to discuss his latest book, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis.

Filmed and edited by Adam Barr.

Speaking as the first sitting US president to visit Cuba since the 1959 revolution, Obama switched to Spanish to say “El futuro de Cuba tiene que estar en las manos del pueblo cubano” — “the future of Cuba must be in the hands of the Cuban people.” His words mark a significant shift, we will be discussing whether they can be realised.

Chaired by Juliana Ruhfus, journalist, filmmaker, and senior reporter at Al Jazeera English, People and Power.
The panel:

Michael Voss is the CCTV correspondent based in Cuba. He moved there in 2007 for the BBC and has reported on the political and economic changes along with a broad range of social and cultural issues. He has been covering Latin America since the mid 1990’s when he was the BBC’s South America Correspondent.

Emilio San Pedro is one of the editors of BBC Monitoring and regional manager for Latin America. He was the Americas Editor for the BBC World Service and travelled frequently to Latin America and Cuba. He was in Cuba last year for a BBC World Service series of reports on the changes in the country. He was born and raised in Miami and is the son of Cuban exiles.

Helen Yaffe, a fellow in the Economic History department at the London School of Economics (LSE). Since 1995 she has spent time living and researching in Cuba, her publications have focused on Cuban political economy and regional economic integration.

Will Grant (via Skype) is the BBC’s Cuba Correspondent based in Havana. He has been studying and working in Latin America for 20 years, and covering the region for the BBC since 2001.

Photo: merc67 / Shutterstock.com

Joined by the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent Patrick Kingsley, whose new book The New Odyssey documents these journeys, we will explore what failures lead to the current crisis and what needs to be done to avert it.

With a new EU-Turkey deal in place, we will ask why it has taken so long for Europe to act and whether this new deal will work.

Chaired by Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News international editor, and author of Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution.

The panel:

Patrick Kingsley is the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent. He is the former Egypt correspondent and has reported from more than 25 countries, including Denmark, where he wrote a travel book called How to be Danish. A percentage of his royalties from his new book The New Odyssey will be donated to refugee causes.

Professor Heaven Crawley leads research on migration and human security at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University. She specialises in aspects of international migration, including policy, public attitudes and the experience of refugees and asylum-seekers.

Hassan Akkad, was a high school teacher and a freelance photographer in Damascus, Syria. He protested against the Assad regime and was imprisoned twice. He left Syria in 2012 and moved to a few countries in the Middle East. Last summer he took a boat from Turkey to Greece, traveled through 10 countries in Europe until reaching the UK, where he was granted political asylum. It took him 87 days to get here.

John Dalhuisen is Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia. He joined Amnesty International in 2007 as a researcher on discrimination in Europe and was Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Programme between 2009 and 2011 with specific responsibility for Eastern Europe, Russia, South Caucasus and Central Asia. Between 2001 and 2006, he was Special Adviser to the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2007.

Heenali Patel sat down with artist and journalist Molly Crabapple to discuss ‘Scenes from the Syrian War’, her collection of illustrations made in collaboration with Syrian writer Marwan Hisham. Using photos sent via cell phone, Molly recreated rare glimpses of daily life in ISIS-occupied areas of Syria.

Filmed by Adam Barr.

In April 2016, the OCCRP also had a hand in one of the largest leaks in journalistic history – the Panama Papers – which revealed the secretive offshore companies used by politicians, oligarchs, criminals and sportspeople to hide their wealth, evade taxes and commit fraud. The documents, obtained from offshore services provider Mossack Fonseca, again demonstrated that corruption and financial crime are widespread and systematic, and infiltrate governments, corporations and civil services – with the UK as no exception. Their prevalence is bolstered by an ability to operate with ease across many frontiers, and transparency remains their natural enemy.

On the eve of a Downing Street summit aiming to challenge cross-border organised crime and corruption, we will be joined by OCCRP co-founder and editor Drew Sullivan and others to discuss how best to report on – and combat – transnational organised crime and corruption, with a particular focus on the London link and recent Panama Papers leaks. We will be asking what the role of transparency and government data is in combating corruption, and what role journalism can play in preventing its occurrence and bringing those accountable to justice.

This event will be moderated by award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough – author of two books about Russian history and politics: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame be Great; and expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.

The panel:

Daniel Balint-Kurti is a journalist and campaign leader of the Special Investigations team at Global Witness. He focuses on anti-corruption issues in Africa and has been at Global Witness since 2010, before which he worked on The Times foreign desk and as an Associate Fellow of Chatham House. He was based as a reporter in central and western Africa for seven years, from 1999 to 2006. At Global Witness he has investigated corruption scandals involving large Western companies in several African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea.

Meirion Jones is an investigative journalist and producer, and former head of investigations at BBC Newsnight. He won the London Press Awards Scoop of the Year prize for his part in the investigation on Jimmy Savile. He also received the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Daniel Pearl Award for his investigation into the dumping of Trafigura’s toxic waste in Africa. Meirion has conducted detailed investigations on vulture fund operations that diverted debt relief from some of the world’s poorest countries.

Drew Sullivan is co-founder and editor of OCCRP. His work has been awarded the Daniel Pearl Award, the Online Journalism Award for investigative reporting, the Global Shining Light Award for reporting under duress, the Tom Renner award for Crime Reporting and many other international awards. He worked as an investigative reporter for the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville and for the Special Assignment Team of the Associated Press in New York. He has also served on the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting.

Holly Watt has been on the investigations team at the Guardian for just over a year, spending the last eight months working on the Panama Papers. She previously worked at The Sunday Times and The Telegraph. She’s been nominated for Scoop of the Year at the Press Awards six times, and has received nominations for news reporter of the year and political journalist of the year. Holly was the Laurence Stern Fellow in 2008 and has reported from all over the world, including Afghanistan and Libya.

The Hetherington family and the Tim Hetherington Trust invite friends, colleagues and everyone interested in Tim’s extraordinary life to spend an evening at The Frontline Club exploring his dynamic legacy through the work of artists and journalists who continue to expand his innovative approach to visual media. The evening will introduce new work by some familiar friends, as well as some hitherto unknown voices who are bringing fresh energy to today’s media.

We will present a first look at the virtual reality project ‘The Ark’ by Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill, produced with support from the Tim Hetherington Trust and premiering simultaneously at Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The Trust will unveil the revised Tim Hetherington Fellowship, developed in association with the World Press Photo, and the evening will culminate with presentations by the five newly short-listed artists for the Visionary Award from the Tim Hetherington Trust. Frontline guests will be the first to learn the identity of this year’s winner, with an opportunity to question the jurors and the artist about the forthcoming project.

This event – taking place on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the mortar attack that took the lives of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya in 2011 – will introduce some new reflections on their lives and will offer dynamic insights into the work of a new generation of storytellers who are challenging our expectations of visual journalism in 2016.

How does the idea of Eurasianism influence modern Russia? We will be joined by a panel, including Charles Clover author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, to explore this theory of Russian national identity based on ethnicity and geography.

From the annexation of Crimea, to Russia’s intervention in Syria and the rise of anti-Western paranoia and imperialist rhetoric, we will examine the history of Eurasianism, how it factors into the thinking of the Kremlin and its impact on Russian society.

Chaired by foreign correspondent for BBC Newsnight, Gabriel Gatehouse.

The panel:

Charles Clover, is an American journalist, currently the Financial Times‘s China correspondent and former Moscow bureau chief. He is author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism.

Rodric Braithwaite is a former British diplomat and author. From 1988 to 1992 he served as British ambassador in Moscow. He is the author of Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War and Afgantsy.

Andrei Sidelnikov, human rights activist and leader of Speak Up! – an international campaign group.

Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington, and a special correspondent in China and many parts of Europe. She is a member of the Valdai Group, invited since 2004 to meet Russian leaders each autumn.

Acclaimed journalist and artist Molly Crabapple has drawn and reported on stories from Guantanamo Bay, Syria, the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan and across the United States. With her powerful illustrations she has pushed the boundaries of visual reportage – and established an important place for art in hard news.

On the release of her memoir Drawing Blood, which intersperses testimony of her own artistic and journalistic engagement with full-colour illustrations, we welcome Molly Crabapple to the Frontline Club to reflect on recent projects and to share her personal insight into the use of art as a tool for better understanding and documenting current events. With US presidential primaries now firmly underway, she will discuss her ongoing work on topical home turf issues including policing and the justice system, as well as her experiences covering the effects of conflict across the Middle East.

Molly Crabapple is an artist, journalist, and author of the memoir, Drawing Blood. Called “an emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery” by the New Republic, she has drawn in and reported from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Crabapple is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. She is the winner of a 2015 Front Page Award for her drawings of Aleppo for Vanity Fair, and was shortlisted for a Frontline Award in 2013. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

This event will be chaired by Natasha Lennard, a British-born, New York-based writer of news and political analysis, focusing on justice, power, biopolitics and dissent. She writes regularly for the Intercept, Fusion and Al Jazeera America, and has written for VICE News, The New York Times, Salon, The Nation and Politico, among others. She is editor-at-large at The New Inquiry journal.

Illustration: Molly Crabapple for VICE: ‘What Life is Like Inside the Besieged, War-Torn Syrian City of Aleppo’

A panel of explorers, scientists, journalists and experts explore the dark links between illegal wildlife trafficking and terrorism in the latest in the series of events in partnership with the Scientific Exploration Society (SES).

Chaired by Andrew Mitchell, SES chairman, forest canopy explorer and founder of the Global Canopy Programme.

The panel:

Dr Susan Canney of the Oxford Tracking Group has worked in conservation science in Africa, Asia and Europe, including living for several years in Niger and Tanzania, and being continuously engaged with the WILD Foundation’s Mali Elephant Project since 2003.

Richard Madden is a travel writer, ghostwriter, and online filmmaker who recently spent two years in the African bush reporting for The Daily Telegraph. He is particularly interested in the role responsible tourism can play in wildlife conservation.

Ian Redmond OBE, Explorer and Conservationist is renowned for his work with Mountain Gorillas and Elephants including undercover investigations and anti-poacher patrols, guided film crews and/or special interest tours into close encounters with wildlife.

Julian Newman is the campaigns director for the London-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), he joined the organisation in 1997. EIA was established in 1984 to investigate, expose, and campaign against environmental crimes. During his time at EIA he has carried out field investigations into a range of environmental crimes, including illegal logging, smuggling of ozone-depleting chemicals and hazardous waste, as well as illicit trade in ivory and tiger parts.

Photo: Shutterstock