The Interview

Will Russia promise not to pervert democracy in Europe? There are fears the Russians could meddle in the French elections and other European votes this year. Sarah Montague speaks to Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's Ambassador to the EU.

Stephen Sackur speaks to the writer and public intellectual Pascal Bruckner and asks, is something rotten in the Republic of France? As the country prepares to elect a new president, polls suggest record levels of apathy and disillusion amongst French voters. A spate of terror attacks has sown insecurity and sparked a heated debate about immigration, Islam and France's identity. Is France living through an age of decline?

Photo: Pascal Bruckner in the Hardtalk studio)

Why did a UN agency publish a report that categorised Israel as an apartheid state? Rima Khalaf was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia until March 2017. She commissioned a report which accused Israel of systematically implementing apartheid policies and promptly resigned from her UN post when the Secretary General refused to accept the work. What were her motives?

HARDtalk’s Zeinab Badawi speaks to psychologist, Jan Kizilhan, a Yazidi Kurd living in Germany who has helped bring over a thousand Yazidi females from camps in Iraq to Germany to start a new life. The so-called Islamic State may be coming under pressure in both Syria and Iraq but still accounts emerge of atrocities carried out by them. The minority Yazidi community has been amongst one of the most persecuted groups of people: living mostly in northern Iraq, they have been killed, forced to convert to Islam and the women and girls have been held in sexual slavery. How does he decide who should stay and who should go?

Sarah Montague speaks to the economist, Professor Sir Paul Collier. The refugee crisis is one of the world's most intractable problems: 60 million people have fled their homes, with a third of them also fleeing their own country. But Professor Collier believes the problem is fixable and "we can do it easily". The solution he argues is to give refugees jobs. In doing so he suggests everyone will benefit. But if the answer was so simple why has it not been done before?

How does the EU need to change if it is to win over the next generation of Italians? Hardtalk’s Sarah Montague speaks to Italy’s Under-Secretary for European Affairs, Sandro Gozi. The EU seems in greater trouble than ever before and not just because of Brexit. Even founding members of the club – countries like Italy - are unhappy about the direction that it is headed in its 60th year. The Italian economy has always struggled within the confines of the Euro. Additionally, it wants its fellow members to help share the burden of the half a million migrants who have arrived on its shores over the past three years. How does the EU need to change if it is to win over the next generation of Italians?

Image: Sandro Gozi, Credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Whether you think of him as Richard III or Gandalf, you will know he has won hearts and accolades around the world - not just for five decades of work on stage and screen, but also for his passionate public advocacy, particular on the issue of gay rights. Sir Ian McKellen was brought up in a Britain in which homosexuality was still a crime. He did not come out publicly until he was 49. Almost three decades on he is still acting and still campaigning. For this special programme recorded in front of an audience to mark 20 years of Hardtalk, Stephen Sackur asks him to what extent has the cultural landscape changed?

Why is a former head of state-sanctioned executions now an opponent of the death penalty? A host of countries around the world still impose the ultimate punishment on the most serious criminals - death. But what is it like to be in command of the machinery of state-sanctioned execution? In a rare insight, Stephen Sackur speaks to Allen Ault, who spent years running the corrections system in the southern US state of Georgia. He organised the killing of criminals until he could stand it no more. What changed?

(Photo: Allen Ault - Former Commissioner of Corrections, Georgia, USA, on BBC Hardtalk)

He spent 26 years in jail for trying to topple South Africa’s white minority government. Veteran anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada has died. He was 87 years old. For 18 years he was with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, and when he was released from prison in October 1989 at the age of 60, he continued the struggle for a non racial South Africa. After the first democratic elections in 1994, President Mandela persuaded him to join him in government as his political adviser.

Sarah Montague interviewed Ahmed Kathrada for Hardtalk in April 2014. A man who had given his entire life to the liberation struggle, he had no time for hatred or bitterness.

(Photo: Ahmed Kathrada. Credit: Getty Images)