Our members

Nando Sigona is Senior Research Officer at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. He is currently working on research on statelessness, diasporas and immigration and citizenship regimes in the EU, and on transitions to adulthood of former unaccompanied asylum seeking children in Europe. He teaches on the MSc in Migration Studies and has taught sociology of migration and forced migration at Oxford Brookes University and City University London. In October 2012, Nando was awarded the University of Oxford's Teaching Excellence Award for his 'outstanding contribution to the MSc in Migration Studies'

Nowras Rahhal is a stateless scientist who was born as a stateless refugee in Syria in 1993. Despite the disadvantages, he was able to pursue his education. Major part of his education, as a child, was in a primary UNRWA school in Damascus. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Damascus in 2016. He left Syria after 7 years of facing the Syrian civil war atrocities and arrived in Germany in 2018 to continue his studies in a master’s degree in Nanoscience. In 2020, he joined a research group at the Max Planck Institute and contributed to the development of a vaccine candidate for the SARS-CoV2 (Covid-19) pandemic. He is determined to raise more awareness on statelessness and to advocate for the rights of those who lack nationality.

Omar Othman has been working to raise awareness of the challenges facing refugees and stateless people since arriving in Europe. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Methods of Teaching English as a Foreign Language and a Master’s degree in Management from Belgium. Born in Khan Younis, Palestine, Omar has organised and spoken at various university-sponsored regional and national events to improve their understanding of the complexities of asylum and statelessness in Belgium. His work touches on cultural, human developmental as well as legal dimensions. Principally, Omar seeks to find strategies for potential citizens to become healthy and dependable contributors to the society they are living within.

Paolo is an accomplished lawyer in Italy with 20+ years of litigation experience in human rights, international, civil and commercial law. He is an expert in statelessness issues.

Philomène began her career in the education sector, teaching in various international schools and universities in Asia for twelve years. In 2015 she enrolled in a Diploma in Human Rights and Forced Displacement from UPeace with the strong desire to transition into the field of refugee rights advocacy. She is currently a candidate in the MA Refugee Protection & Forced Migration Studies at the University of London and an individual member of APRRN and IDC. In India, where she lived for nine years, she first became aware of the issue of statelessness in relation to the situation of Tibetan refugees in the country, with whom she worked as a volunteer teacher and advocate. In 2019, Philomène worked as a Protection Officer in Georgia, focusing on issues of protracted internal displacement concerning IDPs from Abkhazia. In this context, she also became aware of the prevalence of the issue of statelessness in a former Soviet country, and is particularly interested in the study of compounded issues of displacement and statelessness for IDPs and refugees. 

Rachel is a researcher specialised in the fields of citizenship and national security, and citizenship in France and the UK. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Bristol in February 2020 for her comparative, socio-legal inquiry into the practice of citizenship deprivation in the context of France and the UK. She holds an MSc in International law and international organisations and an LLM in International law, both from the University of the Sorbonne (Paris 1).
Away from her research, Rachel was a research & policy volunteer for the ENS in 2018. During her volunteering, she helped with the launch of the statelessness Index and monitored legal/policy developments on various ENS campaigns. She also volunteered for the Human Rights League of Paris for 2 years, where she provided specialist legal advice, support and guidance to individuals applying for French citizenship and other immigration status. 

I have been working as a humanitarian worker for almost 10 years with different organizations starting with UNHCR in Syria as a case worker and then as a senior child protection officer . As a Palestinian refugee living in Syria it was hard to live within the bad security situation during the war so the only option I had is to flee to Netherlands where I was considered a stateless. Being identified as a stateless person was not easy and made me think that we should pay more attention to this group and identify the risks and problems for this group and trying to find solution and make more awareness among the communities about it. Especially that whenever I am asked about the status on my residence permit and and I say it is stateless people have no idea what it means . in my point of view , there should be more awareness about statelessness as a legal term and then more deep in assessment for stateless people to tackle the issues they face in the country of asylum.
Recently my activities has been with NEW WOMEN CONNECTORS and vluchtelingenwerk Eindhoven and this issue of statelessness is one of things that I am dealing with.

Reinhard Marx has practiced as a lawyer in Germany since 1983 with a specific focus on immigration and refugee law as well as law on statelessness and citizenship. He is the author of law books and numerous contributions in journals with respect to these items. 

René De Groot is Professor of Comparative Law and Private International Law in Maastricht, Aruba and Hasselt. He studied Law at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands) and at the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität Münster (Germany). Since 1982, he has taught Private Law, Comparative Law and Private International Law at Maastricht University, where he obtained the degree of Doctor iuris and was later appointed as Professor. He has published extensively on comparative law, private international law, legal education, problems of legal translation, the law of property and nationality law. He is a consortium member of the European Union Democracy Observatory on Citizenship, contributing a number of comparative studies of nationality legislation, including on birthright citizenship. He has worked closely with the Council of Europe in the development of regional standards relating to the regulation of nationality, including in the role of Scientific Expert of the Council of Europe’s Group of Specialists on Nationality. He recently prepared a paper on ‘Preventing Statelessness among Children: Interpreting Articles 1-4 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and Relevant International Human Rights Norms’ for UNHCR, helping to guide an Expert Meeting on the same question in May 2011.

Roua is a PhD candidate at the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI)/ Ulster University. Her research is on transformative gender justice, examining forced displacement-associated socioeconomic harms experienced since the start of conflict in Syria in 2011. She focuses on a particular, yet significant, segment of the population: the displaced families affected by the gender discriminatory nationality law(s) (GDNL) and with children at risk of statelessness.