Our members

Sangita Bajulaiye is the advocacy and outreach officer at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI). She is responsible for coordinating the human rights advocacy work, involved in movement building, and conducts research on (children’s) right to a nationality in unrecognised states. She represented ISI on the governance board of the Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (SNAP). Sangita is also a PhD candidate at Tilburg University (Tilburg Law School). Her PhD research focuses on (arbitrary) deprivation of nationality and the implications this has for the citizen-state relation. She holds an LLM in International and European Law from the same university. Sangita is also one of the "Faces of Science" appointed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Stefanie Grant’s previous roles include Director of Research, Amnesty International; Director of Amnesty’s Washington DC office; partner [immigration  and refugee law] Bindmans solicitors; Director, research branch of UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights; Visiting Research Fellow, University of Sussex; Senior Advisor on statelessness, and on Rohingya research, to Equal Rights Trust. She is currently a consultant to Harrison Grant, solicitors.

Stephanie Huber is a Country of Origin Information (COI) specialist with almost 15 years experience conducting COI research for individual asylum and human rights claims for use in representations to national and international refugee decision making bodies and to the UK Immigration and Asylum Chambers, as well as providing COI research for a number of UK Country Guidance (CG) cases and for UNHCR. She also has extensive experience of undertaking COI reviews for various national and international bodies. Since 2010 she is the co-Founder and Director of Asylum Research Centre (ARC) and between 2016-2022 was the co-Founder and co-Director of its charitable arm, ARC Foundation, where she provides research, advocacy and training on human rights and refugee issues. Prior to founding ARC she worked in a variety of roles for the Immigration Advisory Service, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

Tamás Molnar (1980): is head of unit, Unit for Migration, Asylum and Border Management, Department of EU Cooperation, Ministry of Interior (Hungary) and assistant professor in the Corvinus University of Budapest. In his role for the Ministry of Interior he drafted the national statelessness determination procedure and initiated Hungary’s accession to the statelessness related conventions. He was a member of the European Committee on Migration (CDMG) of the Council of Europe (2008-2011) and CDMG Bureau member for 2010-2011; now focal point of the new Intergovernmental Platform on Migration Issues. He has almost thirty publications in three languages in the fields of public international law and EU law, including issues of nationality and statelessness. His main oeuvres: International Law (co-author, eds.: Gábor Kardos – Tamás Lattmann, Budapest, ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2010); The Handbook on Hungarian Migration Law (co-author with two chapters, one on statelessness; ed. Zoltán Lékó, Budapest, CompLex, 2009) and the Encyclopaedia of International Relations 1945-2005 (co-author with 120 entries on pubic international law; ed. Jenő Horváth, Budapest, Osiris, 2005). He is member of the International Law Association (ILA) – Hungarian Branch, the European Society of International Law (ESIL-SEDI) as well as the Fédération internationale de droit européen (FIDE). He is member of the editorial board of Acta Humana, the leading Hungarian legal periodical in the field of human rights. 

Thomas McGee is a PhD researcher at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. There, he is working on statelessness in the Syrian context. Since 2011, Thomas has served as an expert on cases of stateless Kurds from Syria within European asylum processes. Speaking Arabic and Kurdish, he has also worked on statelessness more widely in the Middle Eastern and diaspora contexts, publishing on the issue in a number of academic and policy publications. With ENS, Thomas has contributed to the Stateless Journeys project about the experiences of stateless asylum seekers and refugees in Europe, and continues to engage in the issue. As well as being an Individual Member of ENS, Thomas is co-coordinator of the recently established MENA Statelessness Network (Hawiati).

Valeria Cherednichenko holds a Bachelor degree in International law, a Master degree in International Law and English Translation, both from the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and an LLM in International and European Public Law: Human Rights from Tilburg University (the Netherlands). Areas of research and interest include: human rights and nationality, statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa, statelessness in Ukraine and the Dominican Republic. She is currently obtaining her PhD in Advanced Studies in Human Rights at Charles III University of Madrid, focusing on statelessness determination procedures in Spain. 

Victoria Reitter is a PhD fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Salzburg. She studied International Business Administration in Vienna and Halmstad (Sweden) and Social and Cultural Anthropology in Vienna and worked as a research associate in two projects (on refugees in Vienna and non-deported rejected asylum seekers in Sweden). In her dissertation, she deals with statelessness in Austria and investigates administrative practices in state-authorities with regard to stateless persons.

Wout van Doren is a Belgian lawyer specialised in migration, refugee and nationality law, with a particular interest in statelessness. He has concluded research and advocacy activities regarding statelessness in Belgium as a consultant for UNHCR's Regional Representation for Western Europe. He also teaches Human Rights Law at the Faculties of Law at the Universities of Leuven and Hasselt.

Yeşim Mutlu is an independent advocate and researcher based in Turkey. She was awarded her B.A., M.A. and PhD from the Sociology Department in the Middle East Technical University. Her research interests include conflict-induced internal displacement, (arbitrary) revocation of citizenship, statelessness, human rights, gender and security, children's right and secondary trauma. Besides her academic studies, for more than ten years, she has worked, either as a consultant or as a researcher, in research projects conducted by national and international organizations on various subjects, many of focusing on disadvantaged groups. Among  others, in 2015, she was awarded a research grant by Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Turkey and conducted the research on Syrian children's risk of statelessness in Turkey. She was also awarded another research grant by Turkey’s Centre for Prison Studies in 2018, and wrote the report about stateless persons in Turkish prisons. She is currently working for awareness raising about (the risk of) statelessness in Turkey and creating the website haymat-loss.info. 

Zsolt Bobis is a Program Coordinator with the Open Society Justice Initiative. He holds MA degrees in American Studies, English Language and Literature, Teacher Training earned at Eötvös Loránd University, and in Human Rights from Central European University. He worked for a year at the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation’s New York office in the framework of The Hungarian American Enterprise Scholarship Fund's Professional Internship Program before joining the Open Society Justice Initiative, initially as a legal intern working on freedom of information/expression and community empowerment clinics in 2011.