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.

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.

Maeliss (Mae) Guillaud

I am a French and New York licensed attorney. I studied one year in South Korea, earned a JD from Sorbonne Law school and completed an LL.M from UCLA. I helped a charity foundation to promote children’s rights in Bangladesh. I lived in Boston for 2 years and assisted an association in the field of sexual violence in civil society and in the incarcerated population. As a probono attorney, I helped underrepresented residents with cognitive impairments to access US citizenship. Finally, I am an active legal fellow of UnitedStateless, an organization promoting human rights for stateless individuals in the US. I intend to join the immigration committee of Lille bar and help people by providing free legal advice but also by supporting them on their journey to access citizenship. I have a strong interest in ethics and justice and wishes to further structural changes to prevent civil rights violations.

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.

Moussa Mbarek

My name is Moussa Mbarek and I fled Libya more than five years ago and have been living in Dresden ever since. I am Tuareg and come from Ubari, an oasis region in the southwest of Libya. 
My goal was always to study. Between my desire to become an engineer or to study art stood my origins. Like many other Tuareg, I have no citizenship in the country where I was born. This heritage determines my life, also here in Europe.
When the conflicts in Libya made a normal life so unbearable that you could be shot by the rival militias at any time and your wages were not enough to survive, I made my way to Europe.
Here I fight for an open society with the means of art and the mediation of cultural diversity. A central point of my exhibitions is the topic of statelessness. This artistic approach has often succeeded in drawing people's attention to this issue and developing an understanding for the necessity of political action.

Moussa Mbarek website

Roua Al Taweel

Roua is a PhD candidate at the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI)/ Ulster University. Her research is on transformative gender justice, examining forced displacement-associated socioeconomic harms experienced since the start of conflict in Syria in 2011. She focuses on a particular, yet significant, segment of the population: the displaced families affected by the gender discriminatory nationality law(s) (GDNL) and with children at risk of statelessness.

Roua holds an MA degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (Poland/UK 2014-2016). In addition to direct engagement with Lebanese, Iraqi and Sudanese displaced communities between 2006-2012, her work with Syrian feminist and women-led organisations included unpacking different aspects of the gendered experience of conflict and contributing to research recommendations to the debates around political solutions in Syria.

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

Thomas McGee

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).

Thomas McGee website