Our members

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.

Victoria Reitter is a PhD fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Salzburg. She studied International Business Administration in Vienna and Halmstad (Sweden) and Social and Cultural Anthropology in Vienna and worked as a research associate in two projects (on refugees in Vienna and non-deported rejected asylum seekers in Sweden). In her dissertation, she deals with statelessness in Austria and investigates administrative practices in state-authorities with regard to stateless persons.