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, Michelleā€™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.

Praxis

Praxis is a non-governmental organization based in Belgrade, Serbia and dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights. Since 2004, Praxis has focused on the issues most relevant to the displaced and members of vulnerable minority groups, such as the Roma community. One such issue is the plight of the many persons who are currently stateless, legally invisible and/or at a risk of statelessness in the Western Balkan region. Praxis has spear-headed a multi-tiered effort aimed at solving this problem, preventing and reducing statelessness, involving the advocacy for changes to law and practice, provision of free legal aid, to persons at risk, publishing human rights reports on the subject, and providing training and awareness raising. Praxisā€™ legal advocacy is informed by its general goals: the eradication of discrimination, poverty and racism, and a vibrant civil society shaped by democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.

Praxis website

Refugees Union in Portugal - UREP

The Union of Refugees in Portugal ā€“ UREP was created on May 10, 2013, formed by refugee communities in Portugal, with the aim of promoting and integrating refugees into Portuguese society. With several buffs of experience in intercultural mediation with refugees from different origins to understand their needs and committed to contributing to the well-being of all refugees in Portugal. UREP, through its actions, aims to understand the needs of refugees and collaborate with other responsible institutions to develop effective responses, contributing to a well-defined and successfully implemented strategy.

Refugees Union in Portugal - UREP 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 Womenā€™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.

Saharawi Collective Youth Association LEFRIG

Our association (AsociaciĆ³n Juvenil Colectivo Saharaui LEFRIG)Ā works to eradicate statelessness in general, and in particular we work with Sahrawis who arrive in Spain from the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in Tindouf (Algeria), to request Statelessness Status. It is a situation that we know very well because many of the members of the association have the recognition of the State of State by the Spanish State.

Our association was born to disseminate the situation of the Sahrawi people, but currently most of the work we do is accompanying and advising applicants for the Stateless Status.

Saharawi Collective Youth Association LEFRIG website

SdruženĆ­ pro integraci a migraci

SdruženĆ­ pro integraci a migraci (the Association for Integration and Migration (AIM)) is a non-profit, non-government organization based in Prague, Czechia. For the past 20 years it has provided legal and social counselling to third country nationals and stateless persons living in Czechia. AIM also attempts to use its legal counselling experience and knowledge in support of advocacy and legislative activities within Czechia and the wider EU.

SdruženĆ­ pro integraci a migraci website

Statefree

Statefree was founded in 2021 with the mission of building a community of belonging and empowering stateless people. Statefree, initiated and led by Christiana Bukalo, a stateless woman born in Germany, Ā has become the ļ¬rst German non-proļ¬t dedicated to the topic of statelessness and now centres their work around three pillars: community, visibility and equal rights. In 2021 Statefree launched an online community platform community.statefree.world and since then has been hosting live and online community events in which stateless people and their allies can connect and share their experiences. Through community-engaged art, communication and media Statefree also osters visibility and awareness of the issue of statelessness in the public sphere. Narratives around statelessness are thereby reshaped, making sure the voices of those affected by statelessness are ampliļ¬ed. Since true empowerment of stateless people is only possible if they have access to rights, Statefree has expanded its work to the realm of political advocacy in the German political sphere.

Statefree website

Swedish Organization Against Statelessness (SOAS)

The Swedish Organization Against Statelessness is an NGO that raises awareness on issues relating to statelessness. The organization mainly works with advocacy and lobbying. The goal of the organization is to amplify the voices of stateless persons, which is done through a reference group, in order to change policy and laws to end statelessness and ensure the protection of stateless personsā€™ rights.

Swedish Organization Against Statelessness (SOAS) 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