Leonhard Call-Blaßnig

Leonhard Call-Blaßnig holds Master degrees in Law and Social Anthropology, both from the University of Vienna. He has been working as legal counsellor for refugees and asylum-seekers at Austrian NGOs since 2008. He also held positions at UNHCR Austria where he, inter alia, conducted research on birth registration and the identification and determination of statelessness. Areas of research and interest include: statelessness determination procedures, access of stateless persons to social rights, anthropology of human rights.

Marija Dobrić

Marija Dobrić is an LLM Candidate at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Marija was a research and teaching assistant at the Section for International Law and International Human Rights Law at Bundeswehr University Munich. She holds a degree in Law (Mag. iur.) from the University of Vienna. Besides her studies in Vienna, she has gained experience in international law through her Erasmus exchange semester at the University of Utrecht and her participation at the 57th Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. She is currently involved in research for her doctoral thesis on statelessness in international law. Apart from statelessness, her research includes human and fundamental rights as well as international dispute settlement.

Marija Dobrić website

Nowras Rahhal

Nowras Rahhal is a stateless scientist who was born as a stateless refugee in Syria in 1993. Despite the disadvantages, he was able to pursue his education. Major part of his education, as a child, was in a primary UNRWA school in Damascus. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Damascus in 2016. He left Syria after 7 years of facing the Syrian civil war atrocities and arrived in Germany in 2018 to continue his studies in a master’s degree in Nanoscience. In 2020, he joined a research group at the Max Planck Institute and contributed to the development of a vaccine candidate for the SARS-CoV2 (Covid-19) pandemic. He is determined to raise more awareness on statelessness and to advocate for the rights of those who lack nationality.

Victoria Reitter

Victoria Reitter is a PhD fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Salzburg. She studied International Business Administration in Vienna and Halmstad (Sweden) and Social and Cultural Anthropology in Vienna and worked as a research associate in two projects (on refugees in Vienna and non-deported rejected asylum seekers in Sweden). In her dissertation, she deals with statelessness in Austria and investigates administrative practices in state-authorities with regard to stateless persons.

Victoria Reitter website