Award winning BBC Special Correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi has been reporting on the Middle East since 2012. Over the past six years, she has been one of the few journalists conducting firsthand reporting of the ongoing conflict in Yemen; travelling extensively throughout the country. Her investigation into a 2015 attack on a Yemeni funeral — the deadliest of the conflict so far — provided key evidence in the case against weapons sales to Saudi Arabia by the US and UK. Her most recent documentary, Iraq’s Secret Sex Trade recieved two Emmy’s this year, the film investigates Shia clerics at some of Iraq's holiest shrines, Nawal reveals the exploitation of vulnerable girls and young women, tricked into 'pleasure marriage’, a practice in which clerics make money from helping men who want sex with very young girls. Secret filming in the film reveals a cleric conducting a 'pleasure marriage' with a girl he believed to be only 13. She has also travelled across the Middle East to investigate how Mass Surveillance technology sold by BAE systems was being used by repressive Gulf states to monitor and stifle dissent by local human rights activists, and recently returned from Yemen where she has been filming the impact Covid 19 has had on a country already battling the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

Azadeh Moaveni is a journalist, writer, and academic who has been covering the Middle East for two decades. She is the author Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, co-author, with Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening, and Guest House for Young Widows. She lectures in journalism at New York University, London and directs the Gender and Conflict Project at the International Crisis Group. Her work often appears in The Guardian and The New York Times, among others.

Rizwaan Sabir is a Lecturer in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. His research, which is focused on examining British counterterrorism, was motivated by his wrongful arrest and detention for suspected terrorism when he was found in possession of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual he downloaded for his postgraduate research. In addition to briefing policymakers such as the Shadow Home Secretary, the United Nations, civil society and community groups as well as lawyers, he offers analysis and commentary in the broadcast and written media including BBC News, Sky News, and Al-Jazeera.