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.

It is half a decade since Egypt’s revolution first erupted, promising something more than a binary choice between Islamism and military authoritarianism. Yet since the unrest began we have seen the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power, only to be overthrown by an army strongman – but is this just the start?

What has become of the big ideas at the root of the uprising – about democracy, sovereignty, social justice and resistance? How can a country so divided between two irreconcilable political orders continue its revolution? Join us to discuss where the Arab World’s most populous nation stands today, as well as its possibilities for the future.

Chaired by Rasha Qandeel, BBC Arabic journalist and presenter on NewsNight and HARDtalk. She joined the BBC in 2003 and since 2011 has covered the Arab uprisings, with a focus on events in Egypt.

The panel:

Jack Shenker is a journalist based in London and Cairo, whose reporting has spanned the globe. He is the former Egypt correspondent for the Guardian and author of The Egyptians – A Radical Story.

Dr Omar Ashour is a senior lecturer in Security Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is an associate fellow at Chatham House and was involved in the process of security sector reform in Egypt and Libya between 2011 and 2013.

Sherif Azer is an Egyptian human rights defender and an expert in online activism in Egypt. He has worked in the field of human rights for eleven years – for organisations including Front Line Defenders and the International Network for Freedom of Expression (IFEX) – and is currently the assistant secretary general for the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights.

Hossam Abdalla is a leading fertility specialist, heading Britain’s largest fertility clinic. He is also a political activist and was one of leaders of the student movements in the seventies. He is a supporter of the 25th January revolution in Egypt and has been a contributor to many programs debating the revolution.

In May 2012, Janine di Giovanni travelled to Syria, the trip would mark the beginning of a relationship with the country that would continue to draw her back, as the situation rapidly became one of the most brutal conflicts in recent history.

Seeking out personal stories, in Dispatches From Syria di Giovanni tells of the rebel fighters thrown in jail at the least provocation; the children and families forced to watch loved ones taken and killed by regime forces with dubious justifications; and the elite, holding pool parties in Damascus hotels and trying to deny the human consequences of the nearby shelling.

Di Giovanni will be joining us, in conversation with BBC HARDtalk presenter Stephen Sackur, to share the stories of the people she has encountered in Syria, as well as her experience of covering the country’s recent history.

Janine di Giovanni has reported on war for over 20 years. She has written seven books, including Madness Visible, The Place at the End of the World, and, most recently, a biography of the Magnum photographer Eve Arnold. She is the Middle East editor of Newsweek, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to The New York Times, Granta and Harper’s among many others.

Purchase a copy HERE and get 30% by quoting SYRIA at the checkout.

In collaboration with the Syrian Association for Missing and Conscience Detainees and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces we are hosting The Caesar Exhibition at the Frontline Club for one day only.

10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
The images will be on display – there is no need to book to attend.

3:00 PM – 4.45 PM
Stephen Rapp, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, will give a speech and is available for questions.

Ambassador Stephen Rapp was appointed Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes by President Barack Obama, and confirmed by the US Senate on September 8, 2009, where he led the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. In that position he advised the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights and worked to formulate US Policy on prevention and accountability for mass atrocities.

He is the most prominent Obama administration official who has spoken out against “atrocities” by the Syrian regime. Currently the Ambassador is spearheading efforts to begin prosecutions against the Assad regime across Europe. He works closely with the Caesar team as the main advocate on legal issues and accountability.

7:00 – 8.30 PM
Panel discussion on ensuring accountability and justice

The thousands of Syrian refugees embarking on a perilous journey to find a new life away from the barrel bombs of Bashar al-Assad, his torture centres as depicted in the Caesar photographs and the threat of the self-styled Islamic State has refocused attention on the war in Syria. With renewed calls for action we will be bringing together a panel to discuss the realities Syrians are fleeing from and how to ensure that they get the accountability and justice they deserve.

Chaired by Ian Black,the Guardian‘s Middle East editor. In more than 25 years on the paper he has also been its European editor, diplomatic editor, foreign leader writer and Middle East correspondent.

The panel:

Mouaz Moustafa was born and raised in Damascus before moving to US at the age of 12. He is the current executive director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC that advocates for a political solution to the Syrian conflict and alleviating the humanitarian suffering of Syrian refugees. Previously, he worked as a staffer for US Congressman Vic Snyder and Senator Blanche Lincoln, and worked briefly with the Egyptian opposition. Moustafa is also a member of the Syrian Association for Missing and Conscience, and will represent the ‘Caesar’ team at the exhibition.

Usahma Felix Darrah is a German-Syrian activist based in Berlin. He is an expert in politics, Islamic studies, international law and a doctor in modern Syria. He worked as a lecturer in Middle East politics at the Arab-European University in Damascus and as strategic project officer in the city of Heidelberg. In Berlin, he is board member of the Association of German-Syrian Humanitarian Organisations and collaborates with the Representative of the Syrian National Coalition to Germany.

Kristyan Benedict is the campaign manager for Amnesty International UK. In this role, he manages Amnesty International’s crisis and tactical campaigning in the UK. Benedict’s responsibilities cover several conflicts, with the priority effort on the Syria crisis. This specifically includes a focus on transition, accountability and humanitarian access needs in the conflict.

The Caesar Exhibition displays photographs of detainees from the Syrian regime’s prisons and detention centres. The photographs were taken by a former military policeman of the Syrian army – known by the pseudonym “Caesar” – who fled Syria in 2013. Caesar smuggled out with him over 55,000 photos of approximately 11,000 Syrians tortured by the Assad regime. The 11,000 victims he photographed represent only a fraction of the systematic torture and killing that took place inside the Syrian regime’s prisons. After thorough analysis by a first-rate legal and forensic team in early 2014, the “Caesar” photographs were shared with and processed by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which cited them as clear evidence of systematic human rights violations by the Assad regime. Most recently, the FBI verified the photographs as credible evidence for future legal procedures.

The exhibition of photographs has been shown at the UN in New York, US Congress and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and the European Parliament in Brussels.

WARNING The images displayed in this exhibition are disturbing.

Four and a half years ago Egypt dominated headlines globally with scenes of hope and change in Tahrir Square, yet now the country garners attention for a very different reason – the imprisonment of journalists.

Much has changed in Egypt since Nawal El Saadawi last spoke at the Frontline Club four years ago, and we are pleased to welcome her again to reflect on the situation today in Egypt. She will be joined in conversation with journalist Wendell Steavenson, who was in Tahrir four years ago and has covered the change that has taken place in subsequent years.

With Abdul Fattah al-Sisi due to visit Britain before the end of the year, we look at the track record of his government and how he is viewed by Egyptians across the board. We will be asking what democracy means in Egypt today.

Nawal El Saadawi is a renowned Egyptian writer, feminist and activist. She has published over 40 books, which have been translated into over 30 languages. New editions of three of her books have just been published: Woman at Point Zero, first released in 1975, The Hidden Face of Eve, and God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels.

Wendell Steavenson has lived in and reported from Georgia, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. She is the author of a number of books, including most recently Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, The Telegraph, Granta, Slate.com, Time, The New Yorker and other publications.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

After years of negotiations, world powers have reached a historic deal with Iran, limiting their nuclear activity in return for the lifting of international economic sanctions.

The deal has been met with a mixed response – some celebrate it as a diplomatic triumph, while others describe it as a precursor to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

For the first First Wednesday after the summer break we will be debating what the Iran deal means for the country, the region and relations with the West.

Chaired by Azadeh Moaveni, a former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, she has reported on Iran and the region for much of the past decade. She is the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and co-author, with Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening.

The panel:

Kasra Naji is special correspondent for BBC Persian TV and author of Ahmedinejad: The Secret History of Iran’s Radical Leader.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan is a staff journalist with the Guardian. He has previously written from the Iranian capital, Tehran. He is now based in London and was named 2010 Journalist of the Year at the Foreign Press Association awards.

James Rubin is a writer, commentator and lecturer on world affairs and US foreign policy. He contributes a weekly column to The Sunday Times. He served under President Clinton as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and chief spokesman for secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright from 1997 to May 2000.

Con Coughlin is The Telegraph‘s defence editor and chief foreign commentator. He is the author of several books including Churchill’s First War: Young Winston and the fight against the Taliban, Saddam: His Rise and Fall, and Khomeini’s Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam.

Holding a cane in his right hand, Movses Haneshyan, 105, slowly approaches a life-size landscape.

He pauses, looks at the image, and begins to sing: “My home… My Armenia.”

It’s the first time Movses is seeing his home in 98 years.

A century ago, on the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, one and a half million of them were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country.

The picture Movses is looking at is taken by Armenian-American photographer Diana Markosian. She travelled to Armenia to meet Movses and other survivors, to ask them about their last memories of their early home. She then retraced their steps in Turkey to retrieve a piece of their lost homeland.

She will be joining us in conversation with Fiona Rogers, global business development manager at Magnum Photos International & founder of Firecracker, to show her work and share the stories of the survivors she met who, 100 years on, still remember their home.

Diana Markosian is an Armenian-American photographer whose work explores the relationship between memory and place. She received her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism at 20. Her work has since taken her to some of the most remote corners of the world, where she has worked on both personal and editorial work. Her images can be found in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time Magazine. Her work is represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

The scenes from Gaza and the media portrayal of events again ignited a global debate about this enduring conflict. A year has passed, the media spotlight has moved on and the people have been left to rebuild their lives, with over 100,000 still displaced.

We will be joined by a panel of journalists who were there to cover the conflict, as well as those who have been involved in the efforts to rebuild, to reflect on what happened a year ago and what life has been like since.

Chaired by Elizabeth Palmer, CBS News correspondent. She has reported on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and on politics and foreign policy in Iran, Syria and the Middle East.

The panel:

Euan Crawshaw is the regional emergency manager for the Middle East at Christian Aid. After 6 years spent working on a variety of Emergency projects in East and Central Africa and the Middle East, he has been managing Christian Aids response in Gaza since December last year.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Daily Beast, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Salon, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. He is the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered the Party and most recently The 51 Day War: Resistance and Ruin in Gaza.

Christopher Gunness is the director of advocacy and communications at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which runs emergency and human development programmes across the Middle East. He worked at the BBC World Service covering the upheavals that ended the Cold War, including the Burmese uprising in 1988. He served as BBC UN correspondent, a BBC News reporter and a presenter on BBC World. In 2006 he was appointed head of communications in the UN’s political office in Jerusalem and a year later transferred to his current post.

Dr Toby Greene is a political analyst and writer. He is the director of research for BICOM, the deputy editor of BICOM’s Fathom journal, and a visiting scholar at Tel Aviv University where he also teaches on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is author of Blair, Labour and Palestine: Conflicting Views on Middle East Peace After 9/11.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

In the Summer of 2012 she squeezed through a gap in the fence on the Turkish border and found herself back in her homeland. This was the first of several dangerous clandestine trips to the North of the country, where she set about documenting the struggle of men, women and children simply trying to stay alive.

Weaving together stories of hardship and brutality with touches of humanity, her new book The Crossing is testimony to the appalling reality that is Syria today. She will be joining us in conversation with Syrian writer and broadcaster, Rana Kabbani, to share her observations and what she has heard from the Syrian people about their hopes and fears for the future.

Samar Yazbek studied Arabic literature before spending a decade as a journalist for various newspapers including Al-Hayat and presenting a cultural programme for Syrian television. In 2010, as a recognition of her fiction writing, the Hay Festival named her as one of the Beirut39, a group of Arab writers under the age of 40. Following the uprising against the Assad regime, Yazbek was forced into exile and now lives in Paris with her daughter.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

In what was only meant to be a three month trip, Emma Sky travelled to Iraq in 2003 having volunteered to help rebuild the country immediately after the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. She soon found herself as a political advisor to the US military and three months turned into a decade.

Over her time in Iraq she witnessed the American efforts to transform the country, the insurgencies and slide into civil war, the planning and implementation of the surge, the subsequent drawdown of US troops, and finally the takeover of a third of the country by the Islamic State.

Sky will be joining us in conversation with The Guardian‘s Middle East editor, Ian Black to share her unique insight into the US military, and the complexities, diversity and evolution of Iraqi society as documented in her new book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq.

Emma Sky is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute. She worked in the Middle East for twenty years and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services in Iraq.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL