Our members

Arsenio Cores is a Spanish lawyer and expert on Human Rights, the Law of Asylum (Spanish and European), Gender based Persecution (including LGBTTI people and victims of trafficking for exploitation), Statelessness, and Unaccompanied Alien Minors. He specializes in strategic litigation before higher courts and has more than thirty positive resolutions in the last ten years before different courts (European Court of Human Rights, [Spanish] Supreme Court and [Spanish] National Court, etc.), regarding non-refoulement in cases of risk to life or integrity, recognition of the status of asylum, admissibility in the procedure of international protection, recognition of the status of stateless Saharawi citizens and revocations of deportation, among others. He has also presented at various national and international conferences.

Aurelia has a Doctorate in law from the Universidad of León (awarded in 1986). She is a Senior lecturer, accredited as a Professor of Private International Law Area, attached to the Department of Private Law and Business Law of the University of León. She teaches at the Faculty of Law, Faculty of Labour Sciences, and Faculty of Sports Sciences.

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,

Bronwen Manby is an independent consultant in the field of human rights, democracy and good governance, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and visiting senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics.  Previously she worked for the Open Society Foundations and Human Rights Watch. Recently, her research and writing have focused on statelessness, comparative nationality law, and legal identity, and she has worked closely with UNHCR on its global campaign against statelessness. 

Caia Vlieks graduated cum laude in International and European Public Law and is a student of the Research Master in Law at Tilburg Law School. She has conducted an analysis of Dutch “no fault” case files with a view to discovering to what extent statelessness plays a role in the decision-making and has written her Master’s Thesis on the extent to which the European Convention on Human Rights obliges states to determine statelessness. Her future research will focus on the protection of stateless persons and the prevention of statelessness by the legal framework of the Council of Europe. 

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.

Christiana Bukalo is the co-founder of Statefree and Trustee of the European Network on Statelessness. Christiana was born in Germany to West African parents and has been affected by statelessness since then. Motivated by her increasing frustration around intransparency, lack of information and the communication gap between stateless individuals and organisations, she decided to create www.statefree.world, a digital platform for stateless people and their allies (NGOs, academics, lawyers etc.). Statefree’s mission is to facilitate communication, information sharing and connection between stateless individuals and their advocates by providing a space that enables community building. Prior to starting Statefree Christiana worked various areas, some of which included Communication, Change Management, Organisational Development & Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

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.

Cynthia Orchard is a human rights lawyer, trainer and policy expert. She was the Statelessness Policy and Casework Coordinator at Consonant (formerly Asylum Aid and Migrants Resource Centre) from 2018-2020 and Legal Policy Officer at Asylum Aid 2016-2018. She has previously worked with UNHCR (London), REDRESS, BADIL (the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights), Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, the Center for Exchange and Solidarity in El Salvador and several other NGOs, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ivory Coast, West Africa. Cynthia was Consonant/Asylum Aid’s member of the Advisory Committee of the European Network on Statelessness for four years and collaborated closely with ENS and other organisations and individuals working on statelessness. She has a Bachelors degree in Political Science (University of California at Santa Barbara), Juris Doctorate (University of Virginia), and Masters degree in International Human Rights Law (University of Oxford). She speaks English (native), Spanish (fluent), French (basic) and Russian (basic).