Aleksandra Semeriak

Aleksandra Semeriak Gavrilenok holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political and Administration Sciences and a Master’s degree in Migration Studies from the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. A former non-citizen herself, she became actively involved in raising awareness of statelessness and minority rights, becoming an individual member of the ENS in 2015. Aleksandra is currently working in the field of refugee, asylum seeker and stateless people reception in Spain.

Aleksandra Semeriak website

Armando Augello Cupi

Armando Augello Cupi is a stateless university student of Global Humanities at Sapienza University of Rome and he is the President of the first Italian organisation led by stateless people named Unione Italiana Apolidi. He studied for a year with Princeton University taking courses in Global History Lab and Global History Dialogues, analysing global historical contexts in which refugees, migrants and stateless persons were the focus of the study together with global history. By the end of this experience, he wrote a research project on restrictions in education for the Rohingya communities, considering Burma and the Cox'Bazaar refugee camp.

Erika Kalantzi

Erika Kalantzi past and current roles include Attorney-at-Law at the High Court of Greece 1990-1996: legal counselor at the Greek Council for Refugees 1998-3/2001: participation – representing UNHCR’s office in Athens - to second instance committee for the regularization of illegal migrants in Greece. 2000-2008: participation to second instance committees for the examination of submissions filed by rejected asylum seekers. 1998 till 2015: editing of the Yearbook of Refugee and Aliens Law (issued by the Publisher Ant. N. Sakkoulas in Greece).

Jyothi Kanics

Jyothi Kanics has a Masters in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford and a Masters in International Relations from Yale University. She is currently working as an Associate Member of Child Circle and completing her PhD at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lucerne. Since 1995 she has been active with NGOs and international organisations including UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children and OSCE ODIHR advocating for the rights of migrants in vulnerable situations such as separated children, trafficked persons, undocumented migrants and stateless persons. She continues to provide expert advice to the Council of Europe and OSCE as well as to various foundations and NGOs. She is an active individual member of the European Network on Statelessness in Switzerland and advised the ENS on its #StatelessKids campaign.

Mahmut Sansarkan

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.

Mheadeen Kadora

Hello, I am Mheadeen Kadora, Palestinian of origin, born in Syria, stateless, I grew up in Syria and received my education until I got a degree in information engineering, currently, I am in Germany to complete my education and obtain a master's degree. 

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.

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.

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.

Stephanie Huber

Stephanie Huber is a Country of Origin Information (COI) specialist with almost 15 years experience conducting COI research for individual asylum and human rights claims for use in representations to national and international refugee decision making bodies and to the UK Immigration and Asylum Chambers, as well as providing COI research for a number of UK Country Guidance (CG) cases and for UNHCR. She also has extensive experience of undertaking COI reviews for various national and international bodies. Since 2010 she is the co-Founder and Director of Asylum Research Centre (ARC) and between 2016-2022 was the co-Founder and co-Director of its charitable arm, ARC Foundation, where she provides research, advocacy and training on human rights and refugee issues. Prior to founding ARC she worked in a variety of roles for the Immigration Advisory Service, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

Stephanie Huber website