Our members

Ivana Canjuga Bedic is an Attorney at law and since March 2006 she has been enrolled in the Directory of Lawyers at the Croatian Bar Association and became a sole practicioner, with wide experience in civil law. From 2008 until present she provides free legal aid in the second instance for asylum seekers in Croatia. 

Jaipreet Kaur is a qualified lawyer specialising in international law, particularly statelessness, refugee law and international human rights law. She is committed to working towards the eradication of statelessness and the protection of stateless persons. Jaipreet has an expertise in the permissibility of loss and deprivation of nationality under international law, and has worked with UNHCR to eradicate statelessness in Europe and globally.
Jaipreet has also worked with Statelessness Network Asia Pacific to conduct research for strategic litigation to provide stateless foundlings in Malaysia with citizenship, and previously worked on providing protection for stateless refugees in Malaysia at UNHCR and civil society organisations.

James C. Hathaway, the James E. and Sarah A. Degan Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan since 1998, is a leading authority on international refugee law whose work is regularly cited by the most senior courts of the common law world. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. From 2008 until 2010 Hathaway was on leave from the University of Michigan to serve as the Dean of Law and William Hearn Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, where he established Australia’s first all-graduate legal education program. He previously held positions as Professor of Law and Associate Dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada (1984-1998), Counsel on Special Legal Assistance for the Disadvantaged to the Government of Canada (1983-1984), and Professeur adjoint de droit at the Université de Moncton, Canada (1980-1983). He has been appointed a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, Tokyo, and Toronto. Hathaway’s publications include more than seventy journal articles, a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, 1991, republished in both Japanese and Russian), an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconceiving International Refugee Law, 1997) and, most recently, The Rights of Refugees under International Law (2005) – the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention. He is Counsel on International Protection to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and Founding Patron and Honorary Director of Asylum Access, a non-profit organization committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the global South. Hathaway also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Immigration and Nationality Law Reports and directs the Refugee Caselaw Site (www.refugeecaselaw.org), a website that collects, indexes, and publishes leading judgments on refugee law. Professor Hathaway regularly advises and provides training on refugee law to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world.

Jared Ficklin is a lecturer at the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice, and a Director of the School's Law Clinic. The Liverpool Law Clinic combines free advice and representation for clients while teaching modules on human rights and international law, particularly asylum and statelessness, allowing students to study these issues while gaining genuine experience. He also remains a door tenant at Garden Court North Chambers in Manchester, where his practice focused on asylum and human rights cases. Jared also delivers guest lectures and presents at conferences on human rights, migration and access to justice issues. He contributed to two chapters of Macdonald's Immigration Law and Practice 9th Edition, and to a research paper on outreach strategies for the war crimes division of the High Court of Uganda. Prior to pupillage at Garden Court North, Jared worked for Robert Lizar Solicitors and the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit as a caseworker.

Jo Venkov is a UK qualified barrister with extensive experience of immigration, refugee, human rights, EU and international law. Jo has an LLM in International Law focusing on governance, development and human rights from SOAS University. For over two years Jo was the Oxford Policy Fellow and embedded law and policy adviser to the Government of Ethiopia, working in the field of international environmental law, climate change, protected areas legislation and sustainability. Her current role is as an International Adviser with Government Partnerships International, a UK Government unit, which shares UK Civil Service learning with partner governments overseas using a peer-to-peer approach to problem solving and capacity development. Jo writes a blog about the legal aspect of identity such as statelessness, citizenship, documentation and belonging: www.thetornidentity.org

Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer is an anthropologist based at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She specializes in political and legal anthropology and conducts long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) and Southeast Asia (Myanmar) and increasingly in Europe. Her research focuses on the anthropology of law, the anthropology of the state, and theories of sociality and social order. Her current thematic interests are: the concept of community, practices of traditionalization, common sense, statelessness and ethnomethodology. Judith also produces country of origin expert reports for British asylum cases, in which she regularly encounters statelessness. Currently she is working on setting up an interdisciplinary research initiative provisionally entitled “Statelessness in Europe (SIE). Expert activists and the challenge of childhood statelessness in European nation states."

Dr Julija Sardelić is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the KU Leuven International and European Studies Institute (LINES). 

Her research encompasses broader themes of citizenship and migration, but she particularly focuses on the position of marginalized minorities and migrants in Europe such as Romani minorities, refugees and other forced migrants, legally invisible and stateless persons. 

She is currently conducting the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project entitled "Invisible Edges of Citizenship: Readdressing the Position of Romani Minorities in Europe". The project investigates the position of Romani minorities as citizens and migrants through the lens of citizenship studies. 
Before joining LINES, Julija was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Law and Social Justice (University of Liverpool), Max Weber Fellow (European University Institute) and a Research Fellow at the School of Law (University of Edinburgh).  

Julija previously published several papers on the position of Roma and the question of statelessness in the context of former Yugoslavia, such as: Romani Minorities and Uneven Citizenship Access in the Post-Yugoslav Space
 

Jyothi Kanics has a Masters in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford and a Masters in International Relations from Yale University. She is currently working as an Associate Member of Child Circle and completing her PhD at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lucerne. Since 1995 she has been active with NGOs and international organisations including UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children and OSCE ODIHR advocating for the rights of migrants in vulnerable situations such as separated children, trafficked persons, undocumented migrants and stateless persons. She continues to provide expert advice to the Council of Europe and OSCE as well as to various foundations and NGOs. She is an active individual member of the European Network on Statelessness in Switzerland and advised the ENS on its #StatelessKids campaign.

Karel Hendriks is an Associate Protection Officer for UNHCR in Iraq, exclusively focusing on statelessness. He is responsible for the overall UNHCR strategy on statelessness in Iraq, including the development of a mapping study to quantify and analyze the stateless population in the country. Prior to his posting in Baghdad, Karel worked for UNHCR in the Netherlands, co-authoring the report “Mapping statelessness in the Netherlands”, which provided a demographic, social and legal analysis of statelessness in the Netherlands. The report’s qualitative findings were based on 25 in-depth interviews with stateless persons. Karel holds a BSc in Anthropology, a MSc in Political Science and an Advanced Master in International Development.

Katalin Berényi is a human rights diplomat at the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the United Nations Office in Geneva and a PhD researcher focusing on how the EU could better tackle statelessness in the area of freedom, security and justice. Previously she worked as a migration expert at the Hungarian National Contact Point of the European Migration Network (EMN) which was mandated to address statelessness at the EU level by the European Council in its conclusions on statelessness adopted in December 2015. She has published articles and working papers on the topic, including Statelessness and the refugee crisis in Europe (Forced Migration Review), Rethinking the Advocacy Tools of the EU in Exporting Legal Principles to the MENAT Region to Tackle Childhood Statelessness (Statelessness Working Paper Series), and EU Law at the service of protecting stateless persons (Internal Affairs Review, Hungary).