Badawi, Raif: 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-Dschafali 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.

Ahmad Danny Ramadan is an author and a journalist with bylines appearing in the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy. He is also the Community Outreach Coordinator at QMUNITY - BC's Queer Resource Centre. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, will be published by Harbour Publishing in May 2017.

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.