Our members

Katerina Komita is a lawyer before the Supreme Court of Greece specialized in human rights. From 2011 until 2021, she had been a member of the Legal Unit of the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR) specialized in vulnerable cases. In this context, for seven years she had been the coordinator of the multidisciplinary project Prometheus (provision of holistic services for the recovery from the consequences of torture suffered by asylum seekers and refugees on a legal, social, psychological and medical level). She has contacted the ENS research Statelessness Index-Greece [years 2019, 2020 and 2021 (ongoing)]. Additionally, she has more than 15 years of experience as a journalist.

Katia Bianchini is a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where she is conducting research on refugee law and statelessness. She holds a law degree from the University of Pavia (Italy), an LL.M. in Comparative Laws from the University of San Diego (California, USA), and a Ph.D. in Law from the University of York (UK). Her doctoral thesis provided an empirical and legal analysis of how the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons is implemented in ten EU states. She has also worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen). Before engaging in research, she practised immigration and refugee law for ten years in the UK and the USA for about 10 years.

Katja Swider is a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam, writing about the contemporary challenges of statelessness determination in Europe. She has an LLM degree in European Law from Leiden University and an LLM in Legal Research from University of Utrecht. In addition to her academic work, Katja cooperates closely with non-academic actors to address statelessness in the Netherlands. She organizes workshops, presents her findings to policy makers, and provides expert knowledge to legal practitioners. Her most recent project is on the potential role of the EU in shaping national statelessness determination procedures.

Keelin McCarthy is a UK barrister practising in all areas of asylum, immigration, nationality and human rights law, as well as related public and civil law. She has been instructed in cases addressing persecutory deprivation of nationality and statelessness. Before becoming a barrister Keelin worked in the international development sector, gaining particular experience of human rights issues in the Commonwealth and East Asia region.

Kelly Staples is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Manchester in 2008 for a thesis addressing the relationship between statelessness, international relations and political theory. She is the author of Retheorising Statelessness: a background theory of membership in world politics, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2012, as well as articles on statelessness and political theory in Philosophy and Social Criticism and Res Publica.

Konstantinos Tsitselikis is Associate professor at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Greece), lecturing human and minority rights and international law. He has worked for the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the UN, the EU in human rights and democratisation field missions. In the past years he has conducted research on minority foundations of the Greek Orthodox minority in Turkey and the Muslim minority in Greece [W. Thrace and the Dodecanese islands].

Leonhard Call-Blaßnig holds Master degrees in Law and Social Anthropology, both from the University of Vienna. He has been working as legal counsellor for refugees and asylum-seekers at Austrian NGOs since 2008. He also held positions at UNHCR Austria where he, inter alia, conducted research on birth registration and the identification and determination of statelessness. Areas of research and interest include: statelessness determination procedures, access of stateless persons to social rights, anthropology of human rights.

Lynn was born as a stateless Palestinian in Syria. In 2014, Lynn arrived in Sweden and has since been working to raise awareness on the impact statelessness has on people living in Europe. She has been advocating for better treatment and respect of stateless people's rights. She has spoken at various regional and national events on the issue, and is an active member of the European Network on Statelessness and the Swedish Organisation Against Statelessness.

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.

Manuela Sissy Brucker has practiced as a lawyer in Berlin for 12 years. She is on the honorary board of the NGO Christopher-Street-Day in Berlin, and in November 2012 published a dissertation on Human Rights and the right to a nationality.