Saudi Arabia remains the UK’s most important arms client, and the government has granted export licences for more than £3.3bn of aircraft, munitions and other equipment. The British government has stated the Saudis must conduct an investigation into allegations of humanitarian crimes. But many are urging that Saudi Arabia’s investigation of its own alleged humanitarian violations is not an adequate inquiry.

At the same time, the US has become more involved in the conflict, including a failed commando raid that caused the deaths of multiple civilians and a U.S. service member.

Is enough consideration of humanitarian contexts being taken in arms export licensing and counter-terrorism? With a judicial review aiming to halt UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia beginning in February, we will discuss the role of foreign powers in Yemen’s civil conflict.

Chaired by Yemeni/ British journalist and filmmaker Nawal al-Maghafi. Nawal’s work has featured on Channel 4, BBC Newsnight, BBC World and BBC Arabic, amongst others.

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

David Wearing has just completed his doctoral thesis on Britain’s relationship with the Gulf Arab monarchies. He teaches international relations and Middle East politics at SOAS, and has contributed articles for The Guardian, CNN and the New Statesman. He sits on the steering committee of Campaign Against Arms Trade, and is the author of their recent report: “A Shameful Relationship: UK Complicity in Saudi State Violence”.

Iona Craig is a British-Irish independent journalist and Orwell Fellow. She was previously based in Sana’a from 2010 to 2015 as Yemen correspondent for The Times. Since Yemen’s civil war began Iona has been the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines to report on both sides of the conflict, travelling over 3,000 miles across the country since March 2015 to file reports for TV, radio and print. During her time in Yemen Iona has reported for over 30 publications and broadcasters worldwide including most recently The Intercept, Harper’s, IRIN and RTÉ radio.

Rasha Mohamed is Amnesty International’s Yemen researcher. She has gone on numerous research missions to Yemen since the armed conflict erupted in March 2015. Her focus has been primarily the range of human rights violations and international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) by all sides to the conflict. For the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, this has included documenting numerous unlawful airstrikes which have killed and injured civilians, and the use of internationally banned weapons. Her research formed the basis of Amnesty International’s intervention in a current UK High Court Judicial Review of the UK government’s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

It is now thirteen years since US and British troops entered Iraq and the significant costs are still being counted: hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of refugees, increased insecurity for the UK, enormous financial cost, and the emergence of Daesh contributing to an increasingly volatile region. Will the much-delayed report sufficiently address the UK’s widely criticised involvement? We will be joined by a panel of experts to hear their initial reactions – and without the power to assign criminal culpability, we will consider the report’s potential impact in bringing those accountable to justice and in assuring that a foreign policy disaster of this scale is not repeated.

Chaired by Channel 4 News international editor, Lindsey Hilsum.

The panel:

Hayder al-Khoei is an associate fellow at the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House and research director of the Centre for Academic Shi’a Studies. He is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s Task Force on the future of Iraq.

Carne Ross is the executive director of Independent Diplomat. He is a former British diplomat who resigned in 2004 after giving evidence to the Butler Inquiry into the Iraq war.

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. She is the author of The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq.

Christopher Elliott, retired as a major general from the British Army in 2002. He is currently a visiting professor of Cranfield University, an associate fellow of RUSI and author of High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

We will explore the disproportionate lack of media coverage – as well as the extent to which the US, the UK and France may be complicit in fuelling the conflict as they sell billions of dollars worth of arms to the Saudi-led coalition. We will map out the players involved, and discuss the toll of the conflict on one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, as well as the potential for reconciliation and a lasting peace process.

Chair: Nawal Al-Maghafi is an independent journalist and filmmaker, and was the first journalist to enter Sadah and gain an exclusive interview with one of the key leaders of the Houthi movement. She has reported across the border in Saudi Arabia on the conditions facing the Shi’a population there, and recently produced a BBC World film on Abdu Aljanadi and his family, interviewing the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his close associates. She has documented the journey of Ethiopian migrants traveling to Saudi Arabia for work and the stories of those who were kidnapped and tortured in Yemen, including at the hands of members of the Yemeni military. Most recently she worked on two films with BBC Newsnight investigating the UK and US role in the war in Yemen and is a frequent writer on The Telegraph, Middle East Eye amongst other publications.

The panel:

Iona Craig is an award-winning independent journalist who was based in Sana’a, Yemen for over four years until December 2014. Former Yemen correspondent for The Times, she has also written for The Irish Times, The Intercept and The Los Angeles Times – and regularly contributes to Al Jazeera America, Index on Censorship, the BBC and others. When civil war broke out in Yemen in March 2015, she was the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines to report on both sides of the conflict. She crossed the Bab el Mandeb by boat between Djibouti and Aden three times to file reports for TV, radio and print from inside the two besieged cities of Aden and Taiz, and spent more than five months travelling over 2,000 miles across the country from Saada to Seiyun to cover the conflict. In early 2016 she met with Al-Qaeda officials while reporting from the AQAP-controlled city of Mukalla.

Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of Human Rights Watch‘s Middle East and North Africa Division and oversees the work of the division in 19 countries. She has led dozens of advocacy and investigative missions throughout the region, focusing on issues of armed conflict, accountability, legal reform, migrant workers, and political rights. She has published widely on human rights issues in the Middle East in international and regional media, including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, and CNN, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Awssan Kamal has worked with diaspora groups in the UK to mobilise and campaign on humanitarian issues since the Arab Uprising in 2011. He co-founded the Yemen Relief and Development Forum, and on the ground in Yemen he has worked with a collective of country activists called #SupportYemen to advocate for the rights of marginalised communities, youth and women. He previously worked in Yemen for Oxfam’s governance programme, and is currently the humanitarian campaigns coordinator for Oxfam Yemen.

The Academy Award-nominated film, the title of which translates to ‘assassin’, tells the story of the inextricably linked worlds of US law enforcement agencies and Mexican drug cartels. 

Sicario follows FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who leads an Arizona-based kidnap response unit. After she and her team lead a successful raid on a cartel hideout, Macer is recruited to work with an inter-agency special ops team led by CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin).

Alongside Graver’s partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), Macer and the Delta Force team launch operations to capture the main narco-cartel players in the city of Juárez. She quickly learns how blurred the lines are in the USA’s inglorious war with Mexican cross-border drug cartels.

Jolin began by praising Sicario’s cinematography, describing it as a “slow-burning fuse, a mix of horror and sci-fi.” He said: “I’m a sucker for an effective score and beautiful cinematography – and that film has both.

“It posits this extreme reaction to dealing with the war on drugs. It takes you into a morally alien world. And the cinematography makes you feel like you’re in another world. When I came out I was thinking, ‘I don’t know what is wrong or right anymore’,” he said.

Vulliamy, who has worked extensively in South and Central America as a reporter for the Guardian, has visited Juárez frequently. One of the film’s opening sequences depicts decapitated corpses hanging from a bridge in the city – a scene which confronted Vulliamy during a recent trip.

But Vulliamy rejected the film’s depiction of the “darkness” of the city. “I’m actually one of the few people who still goes there for my holidays,” he said. “The more I spend time there the brighter its gets, and the decency of people grows more infectious and wonderful.”

Vulliamy said that that the war on drugs is “the first truly 21st century war.” He added: “It is our society that is irrevocably dependent on cocaine and it is our banks that keep accommodating the cartels by laundering their money. It is a totally post-modern, post-political war that is about nothing.”

Vulliamy praised Sicario for showing that the war on drugs in Mexico “is the future” and that in the murky war, “order is the best thing we can hope for.”

He said: “What you see in the film is the CIA putting people back into Mexico who are the only people who can run the system.

“The instruments of state need people like Chapo Gúzman [the recently recaptured cartel leader] on their side and that’s why they keep letting him out of jail, because he can keep the pax mafiosa.”

At the screening of Sicario at @frontlineclub. A tough game between reality and morality. pic.twitter.com/mEj2BjYUyZ

— Federica De Caria (@FedericaAntea) February 5, 2016

However, Vulliamy criticised the film for failing to depict the lives of real Mexicans. “I can’t understand why Hollywood can’t make a film about Mexico that is actually about Mexicans.

“Our sense of Juárez is nil. There’s no sense of poverty, and no real attempt to go there. It’s still Rambo.”

But Jolin defended Sicario’s focus, commenting that “the film is putting Americans at the heart of it and saying, ‘we can be just as bad as them’.”

Au audience member asked why the US government does not push for the legalisation of hard drugs.

Jolin said legalisation was the right path, but that politicians would never dare advocating it because it would lose them votes. Vulliamy suggested that “it would be great for Greenwich Village and on university campuses,” but that poverty-stricken areas of South America where the drugs are produced would not be improved.

“It’s not going to make anything worse. I just don’t think it’s the answer,” he said.

It is election year in the US and one man has dominated the headlines. Six months ago, the prospect of Donald Trump as presidential candidate might have been something to joke about but it is now looking increasingly like a reality. What does this mean for the Republican Party?

With the Republican race dominating much of the spotlight, what about the Democrats? Are we set to see the first female president in the White House? With primaries about to begin, we will be looking at the battles going on in both parties and who we might see come out on top.

What does the rise of Trump mean for politics in the US? We will be looking at the political landscape in the lead up to the November presidential election.

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Chaired by Michael Goldfarb, journalist author and broadcaster. He has reported for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and Global Post.

The panel:

Xenia Wickett is the head of the US Programme at Chatham House and the dean of the Academy for Leadership in International Affairs, Chatham House’s new leadership training initiative. Prior to this she was the executive director of the PeaceNexus Foundation and from 2005 to 2009 she was at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.

Adam Brookes is an independent journalist and author based in Washington, DC. For many years, he reported for BBC News on American politics and the economy, with a special focus on defence and security. He contributed to the BBC’s coverage of three presidential elections – in ’04, ’06, and ‘12.

Peter Trubowitz is professor of international relations and director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and associate fellow at Chatham House. Before joining the LSE, he was professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft.

William Lowery is a New York qualified lawyer and works for an international law firm in London. He is the vice-chair of Republicans Overseas UK, an organisation that represents and promotes the interests of Americans living, working, and studying in the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday 27 May, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of Food Chains, a documentary which gives a revealing insight into the working conditions of farm labourers in the US. The film also follows a campaign against a powerful supermarket chain led by a workers’ movement in Immokalee, Florida. The screening was followed by a Q&A with the film’s director Sanjay Rawal, and producer Smriti Keshari.

Rawal began by telling the audience that his father was a tomato farmer in California, and that as they began their research into the treatment of farmworkers they began to hear more and more about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). The CIW, a workers’ movement in Florida, eventually had a significant impact on the direction of the project.

“When we met the Coalition and saw that they had been able to make some sort of structural change, our whole outlook changed, and we realised… We had an opportunity with the CIW to do something that had a positive message, and make a film that focused on impact.”

Food Chains largely focuses on the CIW movement, which has been successful in pressuring numerous large companies into ensuring fair wages and treatment for their tomato farmers. The movement has consequently seen its profile grow significantly in recent years.

The majority of farm workers in Florida are migrant workers, mostly from Mexico. A number of audience members asked the filmmakers questions related to immigration, particularly concerning the safety of the workers on film. Rawal and Smriti responded that the majority of abuse that occurs on farms goes unreported; many of the workers are so dependent on their wages that they are forced to remain silent, in fear of losing their jobs.

Rawal commented that, while movements like the CIW are managing to make positive developments, it is still often the case all over the world that “beautiful legislation… is not enforced amongst the lowest paid workers, because they are the ones that have the most to lose.”

Q&A with Food Chain director @MrSanjayR Can’t recommend the movie enough. #socialjustice #accountability #responsibility @frontlineclub

— Deepa Mirchandani (@d_mirch) May 27, 2015

Rawal and Smriti went on to discuss the reasons why farm workers originally choose to move to the US, and why low standards of treatment persist. Poverty, persecution and violence drives people to move to the US, and farmers and big companies are then able to keep their production prices down. Consumer desire for cheap food created a condition where the only people willing to work for those low wages are people who are desperately poor.

Rawal commented: “Every European country and the US became economic juggernauts and global powers because they were reliant on the labour of someone who didn’t look like them… The agricultural economies from all over the developed world relied on labour that was next-to free.”

Smriti explained that one of the primary goals for the film was to have an effective ‘impact strategy’ to reach consumers. The film has thus far been effective in “creating activists” – those who have watched the film tend to spread the world and begin actively supporting the movement and causes.

In response to an audience question about the absence of social media used by the characters in the film to bring attention to their plight, Rawal explained that workers are often lacking the most fundamental resources. He described many workers as “living in the 1950s” in terms of the lack of technology they have access to, and which is often “withheld from them.”

On the subject of the resources that farm labourers currently lack, Rawal commented: “The things that will really change their lives are air-conditioners in the summer, childcare… not having to line up for the bus at 5am… It’s like they’re in a different century.”

Visit the Food Chains website for more information on the film and upcoming screenings.

Ill and weathered by decades of drug use, police cast Josué out of the deadly streets of Juárez into the desert, where they left him in a mental asylum governed by its own patients. Six years later, Josué manages the asylum. Now it is his job to give medicine to the sick; to help them walk; to assist them in recovering from the same trauma he experienced while living on the streets.

Attempting to reconcile his broken history, Josué dreams of his estranged daughter in California – who he last saw 22 years ago. He asks Aitken to look for his daughter, who posts pictures on the internet in the hope that she will reach out. Josué and his daughter make contact and agree to meet. The itinerant father knows he cannot explain his absence, but perhaps forgiveness can lead to a new beginning.

Ed Vulliamy is a writer for The Guardian and The Observer. In 2013, he won the award for literary reporting named after the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński for his book Amexica: War Along the Borderline, a vivid dissection of the violent US-Mexico ‘war on drugs’.

Directed by Mark Aitken
Duration: 72′
Year: 2015

With the 2015 State of the Union address showing a rejuvenated and confident Barack Obama, a panel of experts met at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 21 January to debate his legacy, the partisan nature of US politics and whether racial divides have been healed by the nation’s first black president.

l-r: Robert Carolina, Xenia Wickett, Matt Frei, Kim Ghattas, Michael Goldfarb

Chair Matt Frei, former Washington correspondent and current Europe editor for Channel 4 News, began by asking the panel what they thought Obama’s legacy would be.

Xenia Wickett, formerly of the US State Department and now at Chatham House, replied: “His legacy is going to be economic. President Obama came in in 2009 after the great recession, and if you listened to his state of the union, [now] America is strong, the economy is strong.”

Kim Ghattas, BBC correspondent based in Washington, offered her view of Obama as “the president who always struggled to convince people in the US and abroad that he was a good president, that he did a good job, because the narrative of him being a reluctant president stuck, no matter what he achieved.”

To kick off @mattfrei challenges tonight’s panel to give Obama’s legacy in a minute and a half – live now pic.twitter.com/htmL7vKMKM

— Frontline Club (@frontlineclub) January 21, 2015

The panel also discussed the difficult situations Obama has found himself in throughout his presidency. Veteran journalist and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb said: “He was a president at a time when no-one was really in charge, the world was in a terrible state of drift.”

Frei questioned whether “Obama’s legacy is a legacy of absences – the absence of a war that he started, the absence of an economic calamity. Preventing economic calamity is more difficult to get brownie points for than actually causing a great economic success.”

However, as chair of Democrats Abroad UK Robert Carolina pointed out: “Coming back from economic collapse was by no means assured.”

One of the biggest difficulties that Obama has faced as president has been a deeply partisan Republican congress. The panel wondered whether America’s finely-tuned system of checks and balances is unable to cope with such partisan politics. “If it’s trench warfare, it’s not checks and balances,” said Frei.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Democrat Robert Carolina laid the blame with the Republican party for this state of affairs. He said: “They have become a party whose governing philosophy is almost nihilistic. A failure to achieve anything is almost a victory.”

A member of the audience highlighted Obama’s historic status as the first African-American President of the United States. Xenia Wickett commented:

“The greatest achievement in that respect is that you have five people here and that isn’t what we’d put as his legacy. In terms of a statement about where America is today, I think that’s a huge statement.”

With recent events in Ferguson exposing the ongoing deep racial divides that exist in the United States, Ghattas said: “the only people who talk about America as a post-racial society are white.”

Goldfarb added: “He decided, as many successful African-Americans do, ‘I’m not going to make a thing of my race, I’m not going to play that card’. He chose to downplay it.”

The panel also debated whether Obama had gained or lost international respect for his handling of US foreign policy. “What you get from world leaders today is that there is a failure of leadership and Obama is missing in action,” said Ghattas.

Wickett closed the discussion with a comment on the factors that have most hindered Obama’s presidency:

“He’s in a fundamental dilemma. Everybody wants American leadership, everybody wants America to use its leadership to keep sea lanes open, Middle Eastern energy flowing, the Chinese in their box, Europe safe through NATO. But the trouble is they only want it when it’s their way and they all want something slightly different. He cannot win!”

Watch and listen back below:

After a devastating defeat in the midterm elections, which saw the Democrats lose control of the Senate, what can we expect from President Barack Obama as he enters his final two years in office?

Will we see a president stuck in an endless deadlock with the Republicans preventing him from moving forward, or will he attempt to use his final two years to take bold action?

With events in Ferguson, Missouri, highlighting the deep racial divides that still exist in the US, we will be asking what the legacy will be of the country’s first African-American president. Our panel will be taking a view of the political landscape and debating what Obama can achieve in the next two years.

Chaired by Matt Frei, Europe editor and presenter at Channel 4 News. Previously be was Washington correspondent and is author of Italy: The Unfinished Revolution and Only In America.

The panel:

Xenia Wickett is the project director of the US project and the dean of The Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in International Affairs at Chatham House. From 2001 to 2005, she served in the US State Department in numerous positions including in the Bureau of South Asia, the Bureau of Nonproliferation and the Homeland Security Group. After September 11, 2001 she was assigned to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) to work on homeland security.

Michael Goldfarb is a veteran journalist, and broadcaster. He has covered conflicts in the Balkans and Middle East and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. His book Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace, about the Iraq War was a New York Times Notable. He has started his own production company making radio current affairs documentaries for the BBC.

Kim Ghattas is a BBC correspondent based in Washington covering global affairs. She was the BBC’s State Department correspondent from 2008 until 2013, traveling regularly with the Secretary of State. She is author of The New York Times best seller, The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power. She was previously a Middle East correspondent for the BBC and the Financial Times, based in Beirut.

Robert Carolina was elected chair of Democrats Abroad UK in 2011. He started his support of the Obama campaign in 2007, and went on to lead a number of Obama campaign efforts in the UK in 2008. He is a principal with Origin, a London-based international technology and intellectual property law firm.

Where there are borders, attempts will likely be made to cross them in the hope of reaching greener pastures. But the individuals who try are not necessarily welcomed by those who live on the other side. Fences, walls and legislation are thrown up to at least regulate the influx of migrants. And in some cases, borders are made dangerous.

One such place is the border between the US and Mexico, which is now at its most militarised in US history as the US embarked on its “war on immigration”. Mexico, in turn, is both a destination for migrants, as well as a stop on their way north. Ten thousand migrants every year (according to an estimate by Amnesty International) attempt to cross that border, the majority of whom are Central Americans (from Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador in particular). It is not known how many more of these irregular migrants enter Mexico to settle there, or what percentage cross into the US undetected.

Those who do succeed, however, may find themselves in the Arizona desert, or are detained and deported. What is more, these migrants are not only kept from getting into the country: their very journey is thwarted along the way.

Those who are crossomg the Americas towards the US border will often do so on foot, undertaking a dangerous journey. As many of them are undocumented individuals, they must dodge the strict migration controls within Mexico, which means they find themselves on obscure, unsafe routes, along which they may face assault or abuse, or encounter smugglers and traffickers. Large numbers of people are reported missing along these routes and the number of kidnappings is high.

Across the border, migration calls to mind other issues: of employment, housing and social standing. Migration is a complex issue, interlinking the factors pushing people out of their home countries with those that pull them into their new one. Poverty, the lack of opportunities and insecurity at home are reasons for people to leave – while their arrival can have economical, political and cultural consequences. One strong fear is that migrants will take a toll on the local economy and impact the job market. (Although, historically, Mexican migrant workers have been welcomed – as far back in 1850s as field hands in the Southwest, and when the US entered in WW2 in 1942 – albeit on temporary contracts.) This image, of “the other” coming in and “stealing” the locals’ livelihood, or “spoiling” their culture, can become part of polarised political debates, as it has in the US. In a more recent development, many of the policies designed for the enforcement of immigration law, especially detainment, have become privatised, along with the increased militarisation of the border.

This comes down to 650 miles of fence and 21,000 Border Patrol Personnel. In 2012, a total of $18 billion was spent on the enforcement of the border. While there are no hard numbers on the (undocumented) immigrants, their flow towards the US border seems to have slightly decreased – probably partly because of this securitisation, and partly because of the bad economy. Nevertheless, the dangers en route remain. The heightened enforcement along the Mexico–United States barrier does nothing to bring safety to their journey, let alone a solution to the circumstances that made them search for their fortune away from home in the first place.

Migration is a universal occurrence: people have moved away from their homes to settle elsewhere countless times in the course of history, in mass migrations due to wars or natural disasters or as individuals looking to escape poverty and a better future. Human stories are needed to gain a deeper understanding of the issues that come into play in the lives of those who have decided on the perilous undertaking of crossing the border.

In the documentary Who is Dayani Cristal?, Mexican activist Gael Garcia Bernal traces back the trail of one such unfortunate migrant found dead in the Sonora Desert, Arizona. The film, a mix of documentary with fictional elements, was the winner of the Sundance Cinematography Award in 2013. It was screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 7 July, followed by a Q&A with director Marc Silver. For further details of this event, see here.