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.

Barbara von Rütte

Barbara von Rütte is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Prior to this she has completed her PhD at the University of Bern within the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research NCCR - on the move. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research focuses on the regulation of nationality in international law, in particular the right to nationality. Her broader research interests include questions relating to citizenship law and theory as well as statelessness, Swiss nationality law, legal identity, and the administrative detention of migrants both from a constitutional law as well as a human rights perspective. Since 2020 she is a member of the Swiss Federal Commission on Migration and serves as a book review editor for the Statelessness and Citizenship review. Until 2019 she also served as a consultant for the Council of Europe on the committee of experts on administrative detention of migrants (CJ-DAM).

Barbara von Rütte website

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).

Jesus Tolmo

Jesus Tolmo practised as a lawyer for more than 25 years. Formerly, he worked as coordinator of the Legal, International and Advocacy department in Fundación Cepaim, and as a Consultant on statelessness for the UNHCR representation for the Nordic and Baltic countries. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Murcia, his research focuses on statelessness in the case of non-recognized states or with limited recognition. 

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.

Katerina Komita

Katerina Komita is a lawyer before the Supreme Court of Greece specialized in human rights. From 2011 until 2021, she had been a member of the Legal Unit of the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR) specialized in vulnerable cases. In this context, for seven years she had been the coordinator of the multidisciplinary project Prometheus (provision of holistic services for the recovery from the consequences of torture suffered by asylum seekers and refugees on a legal, social, psychological and medical level). She has contacted the ENS research Statelessness Index-Greece [years 2019, 2020 and 2021 (ongoing)]. Additionally, she has more than 15 years of experience as a journalist.

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.

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.

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.