“The Outlaw Ocean” represents a four-year project, built on a series of deeply reported features for The New York Times that brought Urbina from the Antarctic to Somalia — though most of it takes place in the vastness of the high seas, a region that begins 13 miles from shore.  Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways— each chapter in the book tells a very different story.

Join Urbina as he talks to Oliver Steeds, investigative journalist and Mission Director of Nekton, about the book and the challenges of reporting from the high seas. Signed copies of “The Outlaw Ocean” will be available at the event.

Reviews for Outlaw Ocean 

“This is just incredible investigative work.” —Naomi Klein

“Our planet is 70% ocean and yet to watch the tv or read the papers you’d have little idea humans ever ventured offshore. Thanks to Ian Urbina for beginning to close the reporting gap, and for showing the high drama to be found on the high seas.“ —Bill McKibben

“It is a master class in journalism.” — Blair Braverman, New York Times.

Speakers

Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News and a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Several of his stories have been developed into major feature films and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. He has degrees in history and cultural anthropology from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. Before joining the Times, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Cuba and he also wrote about the Middle East and Africa for various outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.

Oliver Steeds is a critically acclaimed international investigative journalist and broadcaster. His films and reports – covering war, human rights, indigenous peoples, environmental affairs, politics and development – have been broadcast by NBC, ABC, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 and Discovery Channels, amongst others. Oliver is also founder and Mission Director of Nekton, a new marine institute that explores and protects the deep ocean.

From finding yourself in the midst of a civil war to working undercover in a Chinese criminal gang, this one-day workshop will introduce you to life as an investigative human rights reporter or researcher.

Whether you are looking to start out in human rights investigating, want to shift your journalism focus to a more investigative bent, or simply have a critical mind, this session will give you the tools to help set up and pitch investigations; from filing a Freedom of Information request to being aware of the ethical implications of using subterfuge.

Importantly, it will also teach you how to have one of the most rewarding jobs in the world and how to survive doing it.

What the workshop will cover:

• The Life of a Human Rights Investigator – the current state of journalism and NGOs.
• How to survive as an Investigative researcher / reporter – how to pitch ideas and make a mark.
• Tools of the Trade: Freedom of Information requests
• Tools of the Trade: Computer Assisted Reporting
• Cultivating sources : interviewing & handling whistleblowers
• Undercover: Practicalities, Ethics & Experiences

The workshop will be led by award-winning investigative journalist Iain Overton.  Overton has conducted investigations into areas that include counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry, UK deaths in custody, corporate killings in Iraq, and Glasgow gang-land murders linked to security contracts. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award,  two Amnesty International Awards, a OneWorld Award, a Prix Circom, a BAFTA Scotland and 3 RTS nominations, amongst others. He is the author of ‘Gun Baby Gun: a bloody journey into the world of the gun’ (shortlisted for a Dagger award) and ‘The Price of Paradise: how the suicide bomber shaped the modern age’, and is the Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence – a research charity that investigates the arms trade.

Here’s what participants had to say about Iain’s previous workshops at the club:

“Really well done – the workshop was rich with practical knowledge.”

“I enjoyed Iain’s wealth of direct experience of what he talked about and of course his passion.”

“This workshop has stretched me to think and pause in amongst the creative process. It was a good combination of practical advice and encouragement to do great human rights investigations.”

“It was inspiring and honest.”

Over the summer, Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace UK conducted a survey of major UK grocery retailers, their use of single-use plastic packaging and their targets to reduce it. 14 responded including all 10 of the largest supermarkets, and 4 leading convenience store operators.

The results, to be released in November, are expected to reveal the volume of single-use plastic packaging each retailer puts onto the market every year, their targets to reduce plastic packaging and their approach to tackling plastic pollution across their supply chains.

The detailed survey, which is believed to be the largest-ever survey of UK grocery retailers and plastic will provide a benchmark for current commitments and actions on curbing plastic pollution. As well as collecting data about volumes of plastic and reduction targets, the survey intends to look at how retailers are planning to meet their targets and to reveal some of the challenges faced by retailers and solutions that are being developed. The results will also highlight where further innovation is needed.

Chair

Ben Webster

Ben Webster is environment editor at The Times, covering the most important environmental stories in the UK and around the world.

Speakers

Catherine Conway, Unpackaged Innovation Ltd.

Catherine set up Unpackaged in 2006 as the world’s first modern zero waste shop. Not only has Unpackaged pioneered a new, desirable, sustainable category in modern retailing; but Catherine’s passion for developing systems to enabling refilling and reuse, within various food sectors has enabled many other businesses to create real and lasting change.

Sarah Balch

Sarah is Senior Ocean Campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and leads the joint campaign calling on UK supermarkets to reduce their plastic footprint, as well as working on EU and UK policy. Sarah has 10 years’ experience in the environmental sector, with recent areas of work including campaigning for the UK microbead ban, the EU circular economy package and plastic strategy, and UK marine and waste policy.

Elena Polisano

Elena is an oceans campaigner at Greenpeace and leads the campaign calling on UK supermarkets to reduce their plastic footprint. She has been at the forefront of Greenpeace’s creative interventions aimed at some of the world’s biggest companies, and recently led the organisation’s campaign that helped secure the government’s commitment to a deposit return scheme for drinks containers in England. Prior to Greenpeace, Elena was an advertising creative.

When Deeyah Khan was six, her father took her to her first anti-racism rally.  A Pakistani immigrant to Norway, he promised her that things would get better and that the skinhead gangs that terrorised their family and families like them would soon find themselves relics of past prejudices, that bigotry belonged in history, that tomorrow would be a more tolerant time.

Three decades on, and we’re still waiting for tomorrow.

With a US president propagating anti-Muslim propaganda, the far-right gaining ground in German elections, hate crime rising in the UK, and divisive populist rhetoric infecting political and public discourse across western democracies, Deeyah Khan’s White Right: Meeting The Enemy asks why.

Following the lauded JIHAD – in which she spoke to radicalised British Muslims who had fought in the name of jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Chechnya and now found themselves full of regret – Deeyah joins the frontline of the race wars in America. She sits face-to-face with fascists, racists and the proponents of the “alt-right” ideologies that have propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. From Breitbart’s darling, Richard Spencer to Jeff Schoep, leader of American’s largest neo-Nazi organisation, Deeyah’s need to find the deeper human causes of horrific social forces opens a different possibility for connection and solutions. Rather than dismiss these men as monsters, she’s determined to discover the men behind the masks.

Urgent and resonant, White Right is Deeyah Khan’s most personal film yet. Nominated for 2018 BAFTA Award in the Current Affairs category.

Run Time: 60 mins

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpWUZ3NG_Do

Deeyah Khan

Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning and two times BAFTA nominated documentary film director, and founder of Fuuse, a media and arts company that puts women, people from minorities, and third-culture kids at the heart of telling their own stories. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Born in Norway to immigrant parents of Pashtun and Punjabi ancestry, Deeyah’s experience of living between different cultures, both the beauty and the challenges, shapes her artistic vision. Her 2012 multi-award winning documentary Banaz: A Love Story chronicles the life and death of Banaz Mahmod, a young British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honour killing. Deeyah’s second film, the Grierson and Bafta award-nominated Jihad, involved two years of interviews and filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Deeyah released her third film in 2016, Islam’s Non-Believers which investigated the lives of ex-Muslims who face extreme discrimination, ostracism, psychological abuse and violence as a result of leaving Islam. One of Fuuse’s recent initiatives, born of Deeyah’s own experiences, is sister-hood, a digital magazine and a series of live events spotlighting the voices of women of Muslim heritage.

Catrin Nye

Catrin Nye is an investigative journalist, documentary maker and presenter for the BBC. She currently hosts the monthly national debate show The Hour on BBC One Wales as well as reporting for the BBC’s BAFTA award-winning Victoria Derbyshire programme, BBC Panorama, BBC World and Radio 4. Catrin previously spent many years reporting for Newsnight and BBC Asian Network developing a specialism in Britain’s minority communities, an area she continues to work on today. She has also written and reported for the Guardian, Prospect, BBC Radio 1, BBC World Service, 1Xtra, 5Live, BBC Breakfast and local radio across the UK. Catrin has won the Mind Journalist of the Year award, two Sandford Saint Martin awards for excellence in religious broadcasting and was one of the Radio Academy’s 30 Under 30. She has also been shortlisted for RTS Young Journalist of the Year and an Amnesty Award among others.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/265807834

Callum Macrae  is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and journalist. An Emmy, BAFTA and Grierson nominee, he has been making films for 20 years in the UK and around the world.. For six years he was an on-screen reporter on Channel 4 Dispatches before becoming a director. Films he reported included the award-winning documentary Secrets of the Gaul, which first revealed the whereabouts of the missing trawler Gaul lost with 38 men on board amid accusations that it had been used for spying. His films include three major investigations into allegations of coalition crimes in Iraq. He has made many films for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Al Jazeera English and PBS. His first television documentary on Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, won the Current Affairs – International category of the Royal Television Society’s Television Journalism Awards 2010–11, won two One World Media Awards and earned a BAFTA TV Award nomination.  His last feature documentary, No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka,  has won several awards, including The Audience Awards at the Nuremberg Film Festival and Watch Docs in Poland, as well as the Human Rights award at the Festival des Liberties in Brussels. From this work, he and his team were also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012

Peter Taylor OBE is a British journalist and documentary-maker. He is best known for his coverage of the political and armed conflict in Northern Ireland and for his investigation of Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism in the wake of 9/11. He also covers the issue of smoking and health and the politics of tobacco for which he was awarded the WHO Gold Medal for Services to Public Health. He has written books and researched, written and presented television documentaries over a period of more than forty years. In 2014, Taylor was awarded both a Royal Television Society lifetime achievement award and a BAFTA special award. Taylor has written eight books on political violence, his latest being Talking to Terrorists. A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Others include Beating the Terrorists? Interrogation in Omagh, Gough and Castlereagh, and his Northern Ireland trilogy on the Troubles called, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Féin, Loyalists, and Brits: The War against the IRA. Each book deals with the Northern Irish conflict from the perspective of one of the three main parties involved: the Provisional IRA; the various Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups; and the British government and security forces. In 2000, he presented the three part BBC2 series Brits on the covert war in Northern Ireland including interviews of former members of 14 Intelligence Company, the RUC Headquarters Mobile Support Unit and MI6. In 2007, he wrote and presented the BBC four-part series, Age of Terror. In April 2012, he was presenter and reporter for the BBC2 two-part series Modern Spies, in which he interviewed serving members of MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ (anonymously).

A story by Carlo Bonini and Giuliano Foschini. Written by Diana Ligorio and Emilio Fabio Torsello.

Trailer: http://www.h24.it/video/DAPHNE_TRAILER90_HD.mp4

Run Time: 49 mins

Chair

Rebecca Vincent is the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters sans frontières (RSF), which works to promote and defend press freedom around the world. She is a human rights activist, writer, and former US diplomat. She has worked with a wide range of human rights and freedom of expression NGOs, and has published widely on human rights issues. Rebecca has campaigned consistently for justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia, and on the broader issue of safety of journalists.

Speakers

Caroline Muscat is co-founder and editor of Shift News She exposed the Gaffarena scandal in 2015, which led to the resignation of then Parliamentary Secretary Michael Falzon and resulted in an investigation by the Auditor General.  Caroline is the former News Editor of The Times and The Sunday Times, while maintaining her focus on investigative journalism exposing scandals such as the one on the ITS site in St George’s Bay involving the Seabank Group in 2016.

Carlo Bonini  is a senior investigative reporter and special correspondent for the Italian daily “la Repubblica”. His career in journalism started in Rome, the city where he was born, when he was in his early twenties, in 1990 as city reporter for the daily “il manifesto”. Since then, he was in New York, at “Newsweek international”, and in Milan, where he worked for “il Corriere della Sera” daily between 1997 and 2000, when he finally joined “la Repubblica” in Rome. In a 30 year long career, he won several Journalistic prizes and published 8 non fiction books. From one of them, “Suburra”, on the Roman Mafia, was the successful Netflix tv series and the homonym movie directed by acclaimed director Stefano Sollima. Carlo Bonini is part for “la Repubblica” of the “Daphne Project”, the investigative consortium of 18 international media outlets led by the French “Forbidden Stories” that had been investigating the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Speakers

Khadija Ismayilova is an award-winning investigative journalist who will be joining us by video link from Azerbaijan to discuss her stories, and the government’s response to them. She has been repeatedly jailed, harassed and defamed, but has continued to expose the financial dealings of her country’s ruling family.

Rebecca Vincent is the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters Sans Frontières. She is a human rights activist, writer, and former US diplomat. She has worked with a wide range of international and Azerbaijani NGOs, and has published widely on human rights issues.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC is a legendary barrister, who was worked for dozens of campaigns over the decades. Last year, she introduced the Sergei Magnitsky amendments in the House of Lords, which seek to restrict visas to those credibly accused of gross human rights abuses.

Speakers

Anne Koch is Programme Director for GIJN the Global Investigative Journalism Network. She’s worked as a broadcast journalist and executive for more than 20 years, mostly for the BBC, before becoming a director at anti-corruption NGO Transparency International. Her award-winning career in BBC journalism included service as deputy director of the English World Service; executive editor of the BBC’s flagship radio news and current affairs programs, and editor of the World Tonight.

Richard Sambrook is Professor of Journalism and Director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. Until February 2010, he was a BBC journalist and later, a news executive, producer, editor and manager. He is a visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University where he’s undertaken research into the future of international news  gathering and the place of impartiality and objectivity in the digital world.

Bastian Obermayer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning German investigative journalist with the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the reporter who received the Panama Papers from an anonymous source as well as more recently the Paradise Papers with colleague Frederik Obermaier. Subsequently after the Panama Papers broke, they published a book on their experiences, The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money.

Rachel Oldroyd is the managing director at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. She joined as deputy editor shortly after its launch in 2010 and has led many of the organisation’s key projects. Before joining the Bureau she spent 13 years at the Mail on Sunday, where she ran the award-winning Reportage section in Live magazine.

Join us for a screening of The Ransom followed by a Q&A with film director Rémi Lainé in conversation with former chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Colin Freeman.

The Ransom dives into the secret system of Kidnap & Ransom, designed by major insurance companies in response to the 30,000 kidnappings committed every year around the world. International insurance companies have created kidnap & ransom, ultra-confidential contracts that are experiencing an unprecedented boom. Following a pending case in Venezuela, The Ransom, filmed in Africa, Europe and the USA, features insurers, negotiators and ex-hostages who speak out for the first time.

With exclusive access to leading hostage recovery agents, The Ransom reveals the cat and mouse games employed to bring a hostage out alive.

By following a few central characters in this interconnected world – often expressing themselves for the first time – The Ransom questions the price of one man’s life and reveals the impact of this vast global organisation on countries with a heightened risk of kidnapping such as Venezuela or Somalia. By emphasising prevention and increasing protection devices, aren’t we just increasing the vulnerability of those who don’t have the means to protect themselves?

“and the price of a man’s life has been determined by the price of things” (Saint-Just)

The Serious Fraud Office has had a big year. In January, its investigation into corruption at Rolls-Royce – which lasted four years, involving 30 million documents — led to a landmark deferred prosecution agreement and the largest fine ever imposed on a UK company for criminal conduct. In March, it reached another substantial DPA, with Tesco Stores Ltd, and in June it charged Barclays and some of its former senior executives with fraud offences. It has probes ongoing into Airbus, Rio Tinto, and other household names.

The fines add up. Since April 2014, the SFO has cost the taxpayer £216 million, but earned the Treasury £676 million – a return of £1million for every employee.

Then came the general election, at which the Conservative Party’s manifesto promised to “incorporate” the SFO into the National Crime Agency – widely taken to involve stripping the SFO of its independence. Although that promise did not make it into the Queen’s Speech, thanks to Theresa May failing to win a majority, the future of the SFO is not resolved. This is therefore a time of both success, and uncertainty.

At the Frontline Club’s seventh kleptoscope, hosted as usual by journalist Oliver Bullough, SFO director David Green will talk about how the SFO works, and what might lie ahead for the investigation of fraud and corruption in the UK post-Brexit. He will be joined by Camilla de Silva, who led a key strand of the SFO’s investigation into Rolls-Royce and was recently rewarded with the Bar Council’s Award of Employed Barrister of the Year, for what promises to be a fascinating evening even by kleptoscope’s standards.