1000 Lashes

Raif Badawi is a Saudi Arabian writer and activist and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals. He was arrested in 2012 on a charge of insulting Islam through electronic channels and brought to court on several charges including apostasy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in 2013, then resentenced to 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison plus a fine in 2014. The lashes were to be carried out over 20 weeks. He has been imprisoned since 2012 and was publicly punished for expressing his opinions with 50 lashes on the 9th January 2015 on the square in front of the Al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah.

Constantin Schreiber is a lawyer and a journalist. He speaks fluent Arabic and was a correspondent for Deutsche Welle in Dubai between 2006 and early 2009. Subsequently he worked for the German Foreign Office in Berlin, responsible for media projects in the Arab world.

Ahmed Danny Ramadan is an experienced journalist with bylines appearing in The Washington Post, the Guardian and Foreign Policy for his reporting in the Middle East. He is also a translator and author, with two collections of short stories published in Arabic. He is planning to publish his first novel in English soon.

Lawrence M. Krauss is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist and a bestselling author of many books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. He is a vocal advocate of the importance of science and reason as opposed to religion and superstition.