Our members

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.

Andrea Saccucci is Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" and Adjunct Professor of International Organizations and Human Rights at the LUISS of Rome. He qualified as Full Professor of International Law in 2018. He is a practising lawyer specialized in litigating individual and collective cases before the European Court of Human Rights and other international tribunals or bodies. He is also an expert of the Council of Europe, EU and OSCE for human rights training activities throughout Europe. He has authored many books and articles in international law, human rights, and criminal justice.

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 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).

Before starting a Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, I took an M.A. in International Studies at Seoul National University, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Business Studies at the University of Mannheim. In 2012, I was an exchange student at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Since 2019, I've been a co-chair of the “Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group” which is an international collective of scholars working at the intersections of migration studies, policy studies, and political theory. Moreover,

Cecilia Manzotti is a PhD researcher at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology of the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the determination of the nationality status of asylum seekers and refugees, including their possible statelessness, in Europe. Previously, she worked in refugee status determination, first as a legal advisor with Africa and Middle Refugee Assistance (AMERA) in Cairo, and later as a decision-maker with UNHCR in Egypt, Turkey and Italy. Cecilia also worked in wider refugee protection, and more recently served as a consultant with UNHCR in Guinea, focusing on statelessness. Moreover, she conducted research on migrant smuggling and trafficking in persons with UNODC and contributed to UNODC publications on these topics.

Clara Van Thillo is a PhD researcher and teaching assistant in international law at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, KU Leuven. She is also a visiting teaching assistant at the University of Hasselt. At the Centre, Clara pursues a PhD on the role that UNHCR plays in the development of the international legal framework on statelessness under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jan Wouters. 
Prior to joining the Centre, she worked as an intern at the General Representative of the Government of Flanders to the United Nations in Geneva. She holds a Master of Laws degree, which she obtained from KU Leuven in 2021. Her Master’s thesis examined the prosecution of sexual violence against the stateless Rohingya in Myanmar before the International Criminal Court. She also studied one semester at the University of Barcelona in 2019.

Denis started his career in the Refugee-Law-Clinic Bochum, as a legal consultant. He is the author of several articles published by the Human Rights League of France. Denis has been a delegate for ELSA international NGO in the committee on enforced disappearances. He graduated from the Strasbourg University as a Master of fundamental Rights. Since then he is pursuing his second Master degree in Human Rights and international humanitarian law at the Pantheon-Assas university in Paris. 

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).

Eva Ersbøll is a lawyer, SENIOR RESEARCHER, EMERITA AT THE DANISH INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. Formerly she worked as a legal assistant to the Danish Parliamentary Ombudsman and an analyst to the Commissioner of the Council of the Baltic Sea States on Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Including the Rights of Persons belonging to Minorities. Her PhD is on Danish Nationality in an International and Historical Perspective. She has published on a number of other topics, including Union citizenship, nationality law in Europe, equality and non-discrimination. She has been working with statelessness for many years, in a national and Nordic context, and as a consultant for UNHCR.