Our members

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.

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.

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.

OPU, the Organization for Aid to Refugees, is the oldest and largest non-governmental organization in the Czech Republic which assists refugees, stateless persons and migrants. We provide free in-person legal and social aid to refugees, stateless persons and migrants. OPU offers this help throughout the entire country by means of aid in all eight reception, accommodation and detention centers and five regional offices. OPU has been the watchdog of any unlawful practices and systemic failures of the Czech asylum and migration policy, including statelessness procedure. This helps us to create systemic change. OPU’s director and lawyers appear in media regularly, criticizing the Czech Ministry of Interior and laws that hurt migrants. OPU has successfully represented many refugees, stateless persons and their families, has fought against unlawful detention and prevented deportation of the most vulnerable individuals and has publicly reported on grave breaches of international law.

The People for Change Foundation is a Malta based, human rights organization focusing on research, lobbying an capacity building. Our key areas of work include: migration, asylum, trafficking, racism, children’s rights and youth participation. We work closely with other Maltese organizations as well as organizations and networks in various European countries and with other partners in other parts of the world. We support educational and research endeavors on migration related issues and seek to conduct our own high quality and policy relevant research. 

Praxis is a non-governmental organization based in Belgrade, Serbia and dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights. Since 2004, Praxis has focused on the issues most relevant to the displaced and members of vulnerable minority groups, such as the Roma community. One such issue is the plight of the many persons who are currently stateless, legally invisible and/or at a risk of statelessness in the Western Balkan region. Praxis has spear-headed a multi-tiered effort aimed at solving this problem, preventing and reducing statelessness, involving the advocacy for changes to law and practice, provision of free legal aid, to persons at risk, publishing human rights reports on the subject, and providing training and awareness raising. Praxis’ legal advocacy is informed by its general goals: the eradication of discrimination, poverty and racism, and a vibrant civil society shaped by democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.

Red Acoge is a nonprofit organization with a network made up of 20 Spanish associations working at local and regional level. We work on the issue of equality of treatment and non-discrimination from an interdisciplinary perspective. We inform and denounce Public policies and legislative changes, such as the above mentioned, raising awareness and disseminating relevant information. We provide social and legal assistance to victims of discrimination, as well as developing education and social integration projects to form an inclusive and multicultural society. We also work with other agencies to improve information and mechanisms regarding access to justice and data collection on the subject.

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.

Our association (Asociación Juvenil Colectivo Saharaui LEFRIG) works to eradicate statelessness in general, and in particular we work with Sahrawis who arrive in Spain from the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in Tindouf (Algeria), to request Statelessness Status. It is a situation that we know very well because many of the members of the association have the recognition of the State of State by the Spanish State.

Our association was born to disseminate the situation of the Sahrawi people, but currently most of the work we do is accompanying and advising applicants for the Stateless Status.

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.