Adrian Berry

Adrian Berry is a Barrister at Garden Court Chambers and on the Executive Committee of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA). He was a member of the Advisory Panel for the UNHCR/Asylum Aid study Mapping Statelessness in the UK. Adrian has an extensive practice in British nationality law, both in relation to historic Commonwealth based claims and contemporary issues concerning automatic acquisition of citizenship, naturalisation and registration, as well as loss of nationality. He has contributed to all parts of Fransman's British Nationality Law (3rd edition 2011), contributed the nationality law chapters to the JCWI Handbook 2006, contributed to Jackson and Warr's Immigration Law and Practice (2008) on the Right of Abode, and contributed the nationality law chapters to the Blackstone's Guide to the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 (OUP 2010). He has also contributed to responses to government consultation papers and advised peers in the House of Lords for ILPA. He was a member of the group of nationality law experts reviewing the draft Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the right to Nationality and the Prevention and Prohibition of Statelessness in Africa, and he was also a member of the Home Office Earned Citizenship Strategic Advisory Group.

Adrian Berry website

Ahmad Jaber

Ahmad Jaber, alias Ahmad Benswait, is a stateless researcher in the United Kingdom. He is originally from a minority indigenous to the lands of Kuwait but excluded from the right to Kuwaiti nationality since the country’s independence from Britain. Benswait’s research is informed by his lived experiences of statelessness, including being arbitrarily classed ‘illegal (Bidoon) resident’ in what has always been his homeland, the deprivation of basic human rights and forced migration.

Aija Lulle

Dr Aija Lulle is a lecturer at Loughborough University, UK. She was the founderdirector of the Centre for Diaspora and Migration Research, University of Latvia (2014-2015). She is an experienced researcher and consultant, and her expertise ranges from citizenship and kinship issues in the context of borders to diaspora. Her current interests are related to youth mobilities, ageing and migration as well as lives of transnational families, especially through broader notion of identities because of intra-European migration.

Aija Lulle website

Alison Harvey

Alison Harvey is a non-practising barrister and holds a Masters in human rights and civil liberties law. She was the Legal Director of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) in the UK. She has specialised in immigration, asylum and nationality law since the mid-1990s, representing individuals and working on policy and legislation, in the UK and internationally. Alison conducts regular training and has published widely on immigration, asylum and nationality law, including statelessness, for example “The UK's new statelessness determination procedure in context” JIANL 2013, 27(4), 294-314. Alison is on the editorial board of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law and is a peer reviewer for several journals. She is a contributor to Fransman’s British Nationality Law and one of the two UK contacts for the European Legal Network on Asylum.

Alison Harvey website

Benedikt Buechel

Before starting a Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, I took an M.A. in International Studies at Seoul National University, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Business Studies at the University of Mannheim. In 2012, I was an exchange student at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Since 2019, I've been a co-chair of the “Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group” which is an international collective of scholars working at the intersections of migration studies, policy studies, and political theory. Moreover,

Benedikt Buechel website

Bronwen Manby

Bronwen Manby is an independent consultant in the field of human rights, democracy and good governance, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and visiting senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics.  Previously she worked for the Open Society Foundations and Human Rights Watch. Recently, her research and writing have focused on statelessness, comparative nationality law, and legal identity, and she has worked closely with UNHCR on its global campaign against statelessness. 

Bronwen Manby website

Cecilia Manzotti

Cecilia Manzotti is a PhD researcher at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology of the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the determination of the nationality status of asylum seekers and refugees, including their possible statelessness, in Europe. Previously, she worked in refugee status determination, first as a legal advisor with Africa and Middle Refugee Assistance (AMERA) in Cairo, and later as a decision-maker with UNHCR in Egypt, Turkey and Italy. Cecilia also worked in wider refugee protection, and more recently served as a consultant with UNHCR in Guinea, focusing on statelessness. Moreover, she conducted research on migrant smuggling and trafficking in persons with UNODC and contributed to UNODC publications on these topics.

Cynthia Orchard

Cynthia Orchard is a human rights lawyer, trainer and policy expert. She was the Statelessness Policy and Casework Coordinator at Consonant (formerly Asylum Aid and Migrants Resource Centre) from 2018-2020 and Legal Policy Officer at Asylum Aid 2016-2018. She has previously worked with UNHCR (London), REDRESS, BADIL (the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights), Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, the Center for Exchange and Solidarity in El Salvador and several other NGOs, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ivory Coast, West Africa. Cynthia was Consonant/Asylum Aid’s member of the Advisory Committee of the European Network on Statelessness for four years and collaborated closely with ENS and other organisations and individuals working on statelessness. She has a Bachelors degree in Political Science (University of California at Santa Barbara), Juris Doctorate (University of Virginia), and Masters degree in International Human Rights Law (University of Oxford). She speaks English (native), Spanish (fluent), French (basic) and Russian (basic).

Dr Eleanor Cotterill

I am a Human Geographer based in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Working directly with stateless individuals, my research aims to understand everyday experiences of statelessness; thinking beyond the status as a legal conundrum and conceptualising statelessness as a complex political, social, and cultural status rooted in the geographical everyday. My research reveals the routine social injustices stateless communities encounter, including access to legal services, healthcare and education, the consequences of these injustices (mental health) and how individuals endure this situation in the UK.

I am also interested in the design and practice of creative research methods to conduct ethnographic research, exploring how creative, participatory research methodologies can be ethically utilised with vulnerable populations. My current research utilises and examines scrapbooking as a form of slow elicitation with stateless individuals.

Dr Eleanor Cotterill website

Eric Fripp

Eric Fripp is a barrister practicing in asylum, immigration, and nationality work, and more widely in public law and human rights cases. He is cited as a Leading Junior in Chambers UK and the UK Legal 500 and listed in the Best Lawyers in the UK. A longstanding focus of his work concerns the interrelation of statelessness with international, European, and domestic laws concerning refugee status.  Important past cases include ST (Ethnic Eritrean- nationality- return) Ethiopia CG [2011] UKUT 00252 (IAC) (deprivation of nationality by Ethiopia from 1998), MA (Ethiopia) [2009] EWCA Civ 289; [2010] INLR 1 (question not how claimant would be treated if returned to country of former nationality, but whether she faced exclusion which prevented her return), and EB (Ethiopia) [2007] EWCA Civ 809; [2009] QB 1, (1951 Refugee Convention covers adverse measures including, where a Convention reason arises, arbitrary deprivation of nationality and attached rights).

He is statelessness contact person for the Fahamu Refugee Resource Centre. He is the Editor (with Rowena Moffatt and Ellis Wilford) of The Law and Practice of Expulsion and Exclusion from the United Kingdom (Hart, 2014), and sole author of Nationality and Statelessness in the International Law of Refugee Status (Hart, 2016).