Our members

Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Romania advocates before the national authorities for setting up a domestic statelessness determination procedure and the lifting of the reservations made by Romania to the 1954 Convention, while in the field of assistance, we provide mainly legal support for aliens without citizenship, including asylum-seekers, refugees, finally-rejected asylum seekers, tolerated or other categories of aliens.

JRS UK provides practical and social support to destitute, appeal rights exhausted refugees, supports immigration detainees and provides advocacy and policy work. In January 2019 we set up the legal project providing free specialist immigration legal advice and representation to those registered with our day centre. Our legal project currently has two caseworkers registered at OISC level 3. Most of the casework relates to further submissions on asylum claims or, where appropriate non-asylum immigration applications. 

Jo Venkov is a UK qualified barrister with extensive experience of immigration, refugee, human rights, EU and international law. Jo has an LLM in International Law focusing on governance, development and human rights from SOAS University. For over two years Jo was the Oxford Policy Fellow and embedded law and policy adviser to the Government of Ethiopia, working in the field of international environmental law, climate change, protected areas legislation and sustainability. Her current role is as an International Adviser with Government Partnerships International, a UK Government unit, which shares UK Civil Service learning with partner governments overseas using a peer-to-peer approach to problem solving and capacity development. Jo writes a blog about the legal aspect of identity such as statelessness, citizenship, documentation and belonging: www.thetornidentity.org

Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer is an anthropologist based at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She specializes in political and legal anthropology and conducts long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) and Southeast Asia (Myanmar) and increasingly in Europe. Her research focuses on the anthropology of law, the anthropology of the state, and theories of sociality and social order. Her current thematic interests are: the concept of community, practices of traditionalization, common sense, statelessness and ethnomethodology. Judith also produces country of origin expert reports for British asylum cases, in which she regularly encounters statelessness. Currently she is working on setting up an interdisciplinary research initiative provisionally entitled “Statelessness in Europe (SIE). Expert activists and the challenge of childhood statelessness in European nation states."

Dr Julija Sardelić is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the KU Leuven International and European Studies Institute (LINES). 

Her research encompasses broader themes of citizenship and migration, but she particularly focuses on the position of marginalized minorities and migrants in Europe such as Romani minorities, refugees and other forced migrants, legally invisible and stateless persons. 

She is currently conducting the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project entitled "Invisible Edges of Citizenship: Readdressing the Position of Romani Minorities in Europe". The project investigates the position of Romani minorities as citizens and migrants through the lens of citizenship studies. 
Before joining LINES, Julija was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Law and Social Justice (University of Liverpool), Max Weber Fellow (European University Institute) and a Research Fellow at the School of Law (University of Edinburgh).  

Julija previously published several papers on the position of Roma and the question of statelessness in the context of former Yugoslavia, such as: Romani Minorities and Uneven Citizenship Access in the Post-Yugoslav Space
 

JustRight Scotland is a leading social justice organisation founded by human rights lawyers in Scotland. It uses the law to defend and extend people’s rights by providing direct legal advice to people who would otherwise struggle to access justice.  JRS operates 4 national centres of legal excellence, which provide the only specialist legal advice in these areas across Scotland: (i) the Scottish Refugee & Migrant Centre; (ii) the Scottish Women's Rights Centre; (iii) the Scottish Anti-Trafficking & Exploitation Centre; and (iv) the Scottish Just Law Centre.  Through these centres, it designs social justice collaborations which deliver legal advice in the areas of immigration, gender-based violence, anti-trafficking, and disability and trans discrimination.

Jyothi Kanics has a Masters in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford and a Masters in International Relations from Yale University. She is currently working as an Associate Member of Child Circle and completing her PhD at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lucerne. Since 1995 she has been active with NGOs and international organisations including UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children and OSCE ODIHR advocating for the rights of migrants in vulnerable situations such as separated children, trafficked persons, undocumented migrants and stateless persons. She continues to provide expert advice to the Council of Europe and OSCE as well as to various foundations and NGOs. She is an active individual member of the European Network on Statelessness in Switzerland and advised the ENS on its #StatelessKids campaign.

Karel Hendriks is an Associate Protection Officer for UNHCR in Iraq, exclusively focusing on statelessness. He is responsible for the overall UNHCR strategy on statelessness in Iraq, including the development of a mapping study to quantify and analyze the stateless population in the country. Prior to his posting in Baghdad, Karel worked for UNHCR in the Netherlands, co-authoring the report “Mapping statelessness in the Netherlands”, which provided a demographic, social and legal analysis of statelessness in the Netherlands. The report’s qualitative findings were based on 25 in-depth interviews with stateless persons. Karel holds a BSc in Anthropology, a MSc in Political Science and an Advanced Master in International Development.

Katalin Berényi is a human rights diplomat at the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the United Nations Office in Geneva and a PhD researcher focusing on how the EU could better tackle statelessness in the area of freedom, security and justice. Previously she worked as a migration expert at the Hungarian National Contact Point of the European Migration Network (EMN) which was mandated to address statelessness at the EU level by the European Council in its conclusions on statelessness adopted in December 2015. She has published articles and working papers on the topic, including Statelessness and the refugee crisis in Europe (Forced Migration Review), Rethinking the Advocacy Tools of the EU in Exporting Legal Principles to the MENAT Region to Tackle Childhood Statelessness (Statelessness Working Paper Series), and EU Law at the service of protecting stateless persons (Internal Affairs Review, Hungary).

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.