Our members

Maria Julia is a Costa Rican lawyer, human rights consultant, and former legal advisor for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Costa Rica, where she collaborated in the statelessness division. She has been working on statelessness issues since 2016 for the Costa Rican government, and as a consultant for UNHCR. Currently Maria Julia is undertaking the LLM in International Human Rights Law at the University of Essex. 

Marija Dobrić is an LLM Candidate at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Marija was a research and teaching assistant at the Section for International Law and International Human Rights Law at Bundeswehr University Munich. She holds a degree in Law (Mag. iur.) from the University of Vienna. Besides her studies in Vienna, she has gained experience in international law through her Erasmus exchange semester at the University of Utrecht and her participation at the 57th Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. She is currently involved in research for her doctoral thesis on statelessness in international law. Apart from statelessness, her research includes human and fundamental rights as well as international dispute settlement.

Marine Antonyan has been teaching at the American University of Armenia (AUA) since 2010. She has co-operated with a number of Armenian NGOs in delivering trainings within the framework of different projects as well as provided consultancy services mainly concerned with drafting legislative amendments. Since 2008 she has also worked for the Translation Centre of the Ministry of Justice of Armenia, an entity created to, inter alia, support the Armenian Government in its efforts to approximate the Armenian legislation to the EU legislation. She has been providing consultancy services to UNHCR Armenia since 2011 in the field of statelessness.   

Maureen Lynch is an independent humanitarian advocate and researcher based in Washington, DC.  She is a member of the International Observatory on Statelessness at Kingston University in London.  Previously Maureen was the Senior Advocate for Statelessness Initiatives at Refugees International where much of her work was based on her 2005 report Lives on Hold:  The Human Cost of Statelessness and RI’s 2009 report Nationality Rights for All:  Progress Report and Global Survey on Statelessness. During her tenure at RI, she undertook humanitarian assessment missions to more than 25 countries including Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cote d’ Ivoire, Haiti, Ingushetia, Kosovo, Kuwait, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Syria, and Zimbabwe. Prior to RI, Maureen worked for UNHCR.  Maureen is co-editor of Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality. She has written and presented on issues including refugees, IDPs, stateless persons, immigration, human rights, psychology, child development, and family studies.

Maylis de Verneuil is a French-trained attorney who has been working for the past ten years in humanitarian missions with different organizations throughout the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, OSCE and NGOs. She researched on migration issues and on the protection of minority rights in the Balkans, and received her PhD in Human Rights from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) in 2016, with a PhD thesis entitled “Statelessness of Romani Individuals in the Western Balkans: Negligence or Discrimination?”. She is currently managing two EU-funded projects, respectively on Child’s Rights and on Justice Reform in Albania.

Hello, I am Mheadeen Kadora, Palestinian of origin, born in Syria, stateless, I grew up in Syria and received my education until I got a degree in information engineering, currently, I am in Germany to complete my education and obtain a master's degree. 

Michelle is an Individual Member of ENS who has worked on Roma rights issues for twenty years. She is an expert in frontline casework, holistic support for individual cases as well as political lobbying on statelessness issues. Alongside this work, Michelle’s grassroots mobilisation and community engagement work is focused on raising awareness on the effects of antigypsyism related to statelessness. Currently Michelle is active as a guest History Lecturer in schools and universities, curates exhibitions and gives presentations in Dutch, English and German. She is active at local, national and European level.

Mike Sanderson read law (LLB) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and holds graduate degrees in law (BCL, MPhil) from Keble College, Oxford and public health (MSc) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He has previously taught law at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford and Queen Mary and King’s Colleges, London. Mike was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 2004 and completed pupillage in the Chambers of Lord Gifford QC (8 King’s Bench Walk). Prior to joining the law school at the University of Exeter he served as a legal protection officer with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in North Africa, West Africa and the former Yugoslavia. Mike continues to act as a consultant to UNHCR on issues related to citizenship and the prevention of statelessness. Mike contributes teaching to undergraduate public international law and is the course convener for undergraduate International Refugee Law (LAW2088/3088), International Refugee Law (LAWM672) and Immigrants and Refugees in the EU (LAWM635).

Mónika Ganczer is junior research fellow of the Institute for Legal Studies of the Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and assistant lecturer of the Department of Public and Private International Law of Deák Ferenc Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Széchenyi István University. Her research focuses on nationality matters in international law, international legal aspects of dual nationality and statelessness, nationality problems resulting from state succession as well as the Hungarian citizenship regulation.

My name is Moussa Mbarek and I fled Libya more than five years ago and have been living in Dresden ever since. I am Tuareg and come from Ubari, an oasis region in the southwest of Libya. 
My goal was always to study. Between my desire to become an engineer or to study art stood my origins. Like many other Tuareg, I have no citizenship in the country where I was born. This heritage determines my life, also here in Europe.
When the conflicts in Libya made a normal life so unbearable that you could be shot by the rival militias at any time and your wages were not enough to survive, I made my way to Europe.
Here I fight for an open society with the means of art and the mediation of cultural diversity. A central point of my exhibitions is the topic of statelessness. This artistic approach has often succeeded in drawing people's attention to this issue and developing an understanding for the necessity of political action.