Our members

Since 1991, Accem has worked to improve the living conditions of people in vulnerable situations, defending their human rights and ensuring equal opportunities regardless of race, creed, religion, gender or opinions. Accem works in 12 regions in Spain and provides specialized integral assistance and counselling to refugees, stateless persons, migrants and other groups at risk of social exclusion in Spain, towards the achievement of their full social integration. Accem develops programs around the field of reception, direct assistance, legal counselling, training and labour insertion.

International Foundation for Health and Environment Protection "Region Karpat" (the abbreviation in Hungarian is NEEKA) is the international charitable organization, created in 1996 and registered in 1998 as a legal entity in Zakarpattya region, Ukraine. Since that time NEEKA contributed to the development of health protection, medical assistance to the population, social protection for persons with vulnerabilities, and as one of the key direction -free legal aid and partially social assistance to such vulnerable groups as asylum seekers, refugees, stateless persons and Roma people. Our NGO has a well-established cooperation and relationship with government bodies at the local and central levels, as well as with other civil society institutions involved into this scope.

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 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 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.

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,  has become the first German non-profit 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 amplified. 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.

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).

Trixiewiz e.V. is a migrant and feminist organisation committed to creating sustainable forms of solidarity in a society shaped by migration. We see ourselves as a space for collaborative networking where we can develop new and effective forms of transnational political participation. To do so, we organise emancipatory projects in which migrants (particularly women*) are treated not simply as audience members, but, above all, as experts in their own right. Through political, cultural, and educational programmes for people who have experienced migration and/or flight, we develop participatory strategies to combat racism and discrimination and initiate processes of self-empowerment.