Our members

Mahmut Sansarkan graduated from the Faculty of Political Science, in the field of Political Science from Istanbul Bilgi University. He has over eight years of national experience in working with disadvantaged groups such as minorities, children, refugees, LGBTQI+ and asylum seekers and leading project management, grant management system, resilience and emergency programs, income generating activities, technical vocational training, food security and economic recovery, entrepreneurship, refugee response, women economic empowerment, child labor, and protection. Mahmut has a special interest in minorities, humanitarian aid, conflict resolution, development, climate change, and gender studies.

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.

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).