ASKV Refugee Support

ASKV is an Amsterdam-based organisation providing legal assistance and social support to rejected asylum seekers in the Netherlands. Over the past thirty years, ASKV has supported undocumented migrants with a refugee background by providing shelter, legal and social assistance, daytime activities, and vocational training. Within the organisation there is a dedicated focus on direct assistance to stateless persons and we work on structural improvements in their situation including through strategic litigation, research and awareness campaigns. ASKV is a vocal advocate for refugee and stateless rights, both locally and nationally and engages in direct policy advocacy for durable improvements in Dutch policy. ASKV’s multifaceted approach to assistance and support for undocumented (stateless) refugees ultimately aims to secure their right to residence in the Netherlands and end their precarious and marginalised existence.

ASKV Refugee Support website

Michelle van Burik

Michelle is an Individual Member of ENS who has worked on Roma rights issues for twenty years. She is an expert in frontline casework, holistic support for individual cases as well as political lobbying on statelessness issues. Alongside this work, Michelle’s grassroots mobilisation and community engagement work is focused on raising awareness on the effects of antigypsyism related to statelessness. Currently Michelle is active as a guest History Lecturer in schools and universities, curates exhibitions and gives presentations in Dutch, English and German. She is active at local, national and European level.

Reem Abbas

I have been working as a humanitarian worker for almost 10 years with different organizations starting with UNHCR in Syria as a case worker and then as a senior child protection officer . As a Palestinian refugee living in Syria it was hard to live within the bad security situation during the war so the only option I had is to flee to Netherlands where I was considered a stateless. Being identified as a stateless person was not easy and made me think that we should pay more attention to this group and identify the risks and problems for this group and trying to find solution and make more awareness among the communities about it. Especially that whenever I am asked about the status on my residence permit and and I say it is stateless people have no idea what it means . in my point of view , there should be more awareness about statelessness as a legal term and then more deep in assessment for stateless people to tackle the issues they face in the country of asylum.
Recently my activities has been with NEW WOMEN CONNECTORS and vluchtelingenwerk Eindhoven and this issue of statelessness is one of things that I am dealing with.

Sangita Bajulaiye

Sangita Bajulaiye is the advocacy and outreach officer at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI). She is responsible for coordinating the human rights advocacy work, involved in movement building, and conducts research on (children’s) right to a nationality in unrecognised states. She represented ISI on the governance board of the Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (SNAP). Sangita is also a PhD candidate at Tilburg University (Tilburg Law School). Her PhD research focuses on (arbitrary) deprivation of nationality and the implications this has for the citizen-state relation. She holds an LLM in International and European Law from the same university. Sangita is also one of the "Faces of Science" appointed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sangita Bajulaiye website