Our members

Jo Venkov is a UK qualified barrister with extensive experience of immigration, refugee, human rights, EU and international law. Jo has an LLM in International Law focusing on governance, development and human rights from SOAS University. For over two years Jo was the Oxford Policy Fellow and embedded law and policy adviser to the Government of Ethiopia, working in the field of international environmental law, climate change, protected areas legislation and sustainability. Her current role is as an International Adviser with Government Partnerships International, a UK Government unit, which shares UK Civil Service learning with partner governments overseas using a peer-to-peer approach to problem solving and capacity development. Jo writes a blog about the legal aspect of identity such as statelessness, citizenship, documentation and belonging: www.thetornidentity.org

Thomas McGee is a PhD researcher at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. There, he is working on statelessness in the Syrian context. Since 2011, Thomas has served as an expert on cases of stateless Kurds from Syria within European asylum processes. Speaking Arabic and Kurdish, he has also worked on statelessness more widely in the Middle Eastern and diaspora contexts, publishing on the issue in a number of academic and policy publications. With ENS, Thomas has contributed to the Stateless Journeys project about the experiences of stateless asylum seekers and refugees in Europe, and continues to engage in the issue. As well as being an Individual Member of ENS, Thomas is co-coordinator of the recently established MENA Statelessness Network (Hawiati).