Statelessness

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei is the Director of Advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD). Sayed has lead several high-level delegations, including to international human rights bodies, one of which resulted in an urgent resolution on human rights in Bahrain, adopted by the European Parliament in July 2015.

Sayed was jailed for six months in Bahrain for participating in pro-democracy protests. In 2012, he sought asylum in the United Kingdom, where he continues to raise awareness of human rights violations in his home country. In January 2015, Bahrain stripped him of his citizenship, along with other journalists and human rights activists. He studied his BEng of Engineering in Brighton, United Kingdom.

Susan Akram is Clinical Professor and Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at Boston University School of Law. She teaches immigration law, comparative refugee law, and international human rights law, and has published widely on these subjects. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington DC, the Institut International des Droits de l‘Homme, Strasbourg, and Oxford University.

Before joining BUSL in 1993, Susan Akram was executive director of Boston’s Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project. She has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Palestine, teaching at Al-Quds University/Palestine School of Law in East Jerusalem, and researching on durable solutions for Palestinian refugees. She was also interim director of the program for resettling Iraqi refugees from the camps in Saudi Arabia after the First Gulf War. She has published widely in the fields of immigration law, refugee law and human rights. 

Areej Alshammiry is a Graduate Student in Social Justice & International Studies in Education, Dept of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta. Her research interests focus on transnational approaches to migration and identity politics. She looks into the ways citizenship and immigration policies are racialized and gendered, and how the construction of the national fabric is made in ways to exclude rather than include.

She believes these ideologies underpin the social and political structures we live in, allowing them to produce and reproduce aliens in different spaces at different times. She explores ways to identify the foundations and the tools that drive these structures and how to resist them.

Nasser Al-Anezy is a formerly stateless person from Kuwait and is the Chair and Director of the Kuwaiti Community Association based in Harrow, Greater London, since 2001.

Nasser has completed the programme in Human Right Advocacy at World University Services in 2003. He has a BSc degree from the Kuwaiti University. He was a teacher for 8 years in Kuwait, and has an MSc degree in computing from Brunel University. 

Zahra Albazari is a Senior Researcher at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. She specialises on the nexus between statelessness and forced displacement, and the interlink between discrimination and statelessness, including work on gender inequality in nationality law. Geographically, her work has focused mainly on statelessness and nationality in the Middle East and Africa region. Alongside her work at the Institute, Zahra is enrolled as a PhD researcher at Tilburg Law School. She is also a Board member of the Syrian Legal Development Programme.

Zahra has been working on the issue of statelessness since 2010, and has been involved in conducting studies on statelessness for UNHCR, WRC, IRC, NRC, the Open Society Justice Initiative, and Amel House of Human Rights. She holds an LLM in International Law from Leeds University, and enjoys teaching and training on the issue of statelessness.

David Baluarte is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Washington and Lee University School of Law. Baluarte has acted as the lead researcher and project director for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on a variety of initiatives to identify and protect stateless persons in the United States and the Caribbean.

Most notably, he performed a study of statelessness in the US that led to the publication of the UNHCR report Citizens of Nowhere, and he subsequently established a pilot law clinic to provide pro bono legal services to stateless persons in the US. Baluarte has also directed a UNHCR funded project to establish a nationality rights clinic in The Bahamas and acted as co-counsel on two cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against the Dominican Republic on the issue of nationality rights and statelessness.

Fardous Bahbouh is the founding director of Lingua Media Connect LTD, providing professional Arabic and English translation, teaching and media services. Fardous is a multilingual journalist, voice-over artist, researcher, teacher, and an Oscar-winner documentary translator. She specialises in politics, international affairs, education, media, and technical translation. She has worked extensively in a variety of roles in Syria, the United States, Turkey and the United Kingdom. She has recently started teaching drama to migrant and refugee women to help them learn English and further develop their leadership skills.

Fardous’s clients include Al-Jazeera, Netflix, Channel 4, Sky News, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, the Chartered Institute of Linguists, Chatham House, King’s College London, the World Bank, the British Museum, and several production companies.

Fardous is also a community organizer and the founder of Ahlan Wa Sahlan, a grassroots initiative welcoming refugees to London.

Claire Beaugrand is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.  She graduated from SciencesPo (Paris) and Sorbonne University (History, Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne) before obtaining an MSc (Development Studies) from the London School of Economics (LSE).  She worked on her PhD thesis in the International Relations Department at the LSE (2010) under the supervision of late Professor Fred Halliday, funded by a scholarship from the CEFAS (French Centre for Archaeology and Social Sciences).

After working as a Gulf Senior Analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG), she joined the newly established branch of the Institut Français du Proche Orient, in the occupied Palestinian Territories (2013- 17).  She was a core-researcher in the ERC-funded WAFAW project (2013-17), responsible for the research axis on “Diaspora and Arab revolutions and transitions” .  She is a founding and editorial board member of the website Orientxxi.org (French/Arabic/English).

Kaweh Beheshtizadeh works as an immigration, asylum and human rights solicitor at Fadiga and Co taking cases through from initial application to appeal. He also acts in relation to public law and civil work arising from the Secretary of State for the Home Department’s decisions within that field, in particular in relation to fresh asylum and human rights claims and unlawful detention by way of judicial review and civil claims at county court or high court.

Kaweh is known for dealing with very complex and serious cases. Whilst he qualified as a solicitor in May 2016, he handles the cases with the assurance of a much more senior lawyer and with a rare dedication and passion. He won Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year in Immigration and Asylum Category in 2017 and he was shortlisted for Human Rights Lawyer of the Year by the Law Society on the same year.

Judith Beyer is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at Konstanz University. She conducts long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) and Southeast Asia (Myanmar). Her research focuses on the anthropology of the state, legal pluralism and theories of social order. Her current thematic interests are practices of traditionalisation, statelessness, common sense, and ethnomethodology.

Judith Beyer is currently Member of the International Advisory Board of the peer-reviewed journal Central Asian Survey; Review Editor of the legal anthropological platform Allegralaboratory.net , Peer-Review Coordinator for the cross-disciplinary journal Glocalism. Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, Member of the Network for Ethnographic Theory and Associate Member of the European Network on Statelessness (ENS). She has been awarded a Fernand Braudel Associate Directorship (Directeur d’Études Associées) by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in Paris for 2018.

Jo Bezzano is a solicitor with a background in immigration and asylum law. She practices and teaches at the Liverpool Law Clinic. For the past 20 months, with the help of charitable funding, she has been running a statelessness caseload and has one of the single biggest statelessness application caseloads in the UK.

Although she is still awaiting outcomes on most of her cases this gives her a good insight into the practical application of the statelessness application process in the UK. She previously worked at Elder Rahimi solicitors, London.

Tendayi Bloom is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University, UK.

She is author of Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor, with Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole, of Understanding Statelessness (Routledge, 2017).

Jan Brulc is the Head of Communications at the European Network on Statelessness (ENS). He joined ENS in 2015 to lead on communications and campaigns work. He holds a MA in politics. Previously, Jan worked for the Migrants’ Rights Network and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, managing communications work from their London and Brussels offices.

He also worked as a lead web developer at Small Axe, a digital communications agency and in the media department at the European Medicine Agency.

Judith Carter is in-house solicitor and lecturer at the Liverpool Law Clinic. She is co-author with Sarah Woodhouse of the ILPA/University of Liverpool Statelessness and applications for leave to remain: a best practice guide, published in November 2016.

She previously worked in Islington Law Centre and private practice on immigration and asylum cases and has contributed to publications on the Human Rights Act (in 2000) and children in detention (2010).

Amal de Chickera is a co-director and co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (www.InstituteSI.org). Amal has researched, advocated, written, spoken, delivered training and served as an expert on statelessness and related issues for the UN, NGOs and academia, since 2008. He is particularly interested in the nexus between statelessness and discrimination and its implications on access to other rights.

Before co-founding the Institute, Amal provided the lead on the Equal Rights Trust’s statelessness work. He was also one of the co-founders of the European Network on Statelessness, and is a founding member of Stages – a Sri Lankan theatre group. A human rights lawyer and member of the Sri Lankan Bar, Amal holds an LLM (Distinction) from University College London and an LLB (Hons.) from the University of Colombo.

Phillip Cole is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the West of England. He is author of Philosophies of Exclusion (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and The Myth of Evil (Edinburgh University Press 2006).

He is also co-author of Debating the Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Understanding Statelessness (Routledge, 2017).

Eric Fripp, barrister of Lamb Buildings, has appeared in many of the leading cases concerning refugees in recent years and in several leading immigration decisions. He is noted for his thoroughness and skill as an advocate in tribunals and in the higher courts and for the breadth of his supporting interests in legal and political philosophy and history.

He is recognised as a particular authority on nationality and statelessness and their interaction with the Refugee Convention 1951 and other protective instruments and has particular interests in public international law including human rights and humanitarian law, international refugee law, domestic administrative and constitutional law, and legal and political history and philosophy. He has a particular commitment to the clear exposition of complex legal issues.

He is the author of Nationality and Statelessness in the International Law of Refugee Status.

Nicole Garbin is a Lawyer at the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), an international public interest law organisation working to combat anti-Romani racism and human rights abuse of Roma through strategic litigation, research and policy development, advocacy and human rights education.

Nicole holds a Master degree in Legal Studies from the University of Trieste (Italy) and a Master degree in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law from Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas (France) with a dissertation about intersectionality and forced sterilisation of Romani women. She is a qualified Italian lawyer and worked for Italian and French law firms before joining the ERRC legal team in January 2015.

At the ERRC, Nicole principally focuses on issues related to housing such as evictions, segregation in housing and right to water, statelessness, hate crimes and hate speech. She also cooperates on issues related to women’ rights and segregation in education.

Lucy Gregg works in UNHCR’s legal protection team in the London office as a Senior Protection Associate, specifically as part of the Quality Integration Project. This project is an initiative set up in partnership with the Home Office in which UNHCR audit Home Office asylum and stateless leave decision-making.

Lucy was also a researcher on the mapping study of stateless people in the UK undertaken jointly with Asylum Aid in 2011.

Gábor Gyulai is the director of the Refugee Programme, Hungarian Helskink Committee, as well as the president and a founding member of the European Network on Statelessness (ENS).

He is also an expert with the European Judicial Training Network (EJTN). He has been working in the field of asylum since 2000, and is a member of the Helsinki Committee team since 2002. He specifically works on evidence and credibility assessment in asylum procedures; interdisciplinary (psychological, intercultural, linguistic and gender) issues related to asylum; human rights safeguards concerning the detention of migrants; nationality and statelessness.

He trains in communication and capacity-building in the field of human rights and forced migration, and has extensively researched and published on these issues. In the past ten years, he has been teaching to over three thousand lawyers, judges, public administration and police officers, journalists, professors, NGO workers and staff members of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on asylum, migration and statelessness. 

Alison Harvey is a practising barrister at No 5 Chambers and holds a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Civil Liberties Law. She was the Legal Director of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) in the UK until September 2017. She has specialised in immigration, asylum and nationality law since the mid-1990s, representing individuals and working on policy and legislation, in the UK and internationally.

Alison conducts regular training and has published widely on immigration, asylum and nationality law, including statelessness. “The UK’s new statelessness determination procedure in context” JIANL 2013, 27(4), 294-314 is an example. Alison is on the editorial board of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law and is a peer reviewer for several journals. She is a contributor to Fransman’s British Nationality Law and one of the two UK contacts for the European Legal Network on Asylum.

Mikhil Karnik, barrister of Garden Court North, practises in public law and human rights law particularly arising from his immigration practice, specialising in judicial review including issues of nationality, injunctive relief of administrative decisions such as unlawful detention and removal decisions.

He has also acted in decisions relating to leave to remain, permission to work, statelessness, access to student loans and has successfully required the Secretary of State to return clients unlawfully removed. Before being called to the Bar in 2005, Mikhil spent 15 years providing advice, guidance and consultancy on technical environmental and health and safety matters. Mikhil accepts pro bono work, especially in asylum where the changes in legal aid have created significant problems of access to the courts.

Yoana Kuzmova is a US-trained attorney practicing in the areas of immigration and refugee law and a clinical instructor at the Boston University School of Law's International Human Rights Clinic. Her research focuses on protracted statelessness and the future of citizenship laws. For the last three years, Yoana and her students at the International Human Rights Clinic have been representing a group of stateless former refugees in their search for durable solutions.

Alongside this project, Yoana co-teaches a simulation course based on the citizenship-stripping crisis in the Dominican Republic. Prior to joining the International Human Rights Clinic, Yoana has represented asylum seekers and worked on federal court appeals of U.S. citizens challenging wrongful deportation from the United States.

Jean Lambert, MEP, was first elected to the European Parliament in 1999 as the Green Member for London. She was re-elected for a fourth term in the May 2014 European Elections.

She is currently a full member of the committee on Employment and Social Affairs where she specialises on social inclusion, workers' rights, immigration, social security, and the European semester process.

Jean is also a substitute member of the committee on Civil Liberties where she works on issues related to asylum, immigration, children's rights and anti-discrimination.

In 2014, Jean was re-elected for a second term as the Chair of the European Parliament's Delegation for relations with the countries of South Asia. Within this delegation, she leads on the Parliament’s external relations with Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Stuart McDonald MP is the Member of Parliament for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East. He is the SNP Spokesperson on Immigration, Asylum and Border Control and he serves on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Stuart studied law at Edinburgh University and trained and worked in the legal profession for eight years both in the capital and in Glasgow: first in private practice, then with the NHS and finally in the third sector as a human rights solicitor. 

In 2009, Stuart made the switch into politics taking up research posts with Shirley-Anne Somerville MSP and then Jim Eadie MSP at the Scottish Parliament. This lead on to the role of head of information at Yes Scotland during the referendum campaign. Finally, Stuart worked for the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights as Parliamentary and Public Affairs Officer.

Pierre Makhlouf has worked in the field of Immigration and Asylum Law since 1989, beginning his career in private practice with Simons Muirhead and Burton Solicitors and joining Hackney Community Law Centre in January 1995.

He became Assistant Director at Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) in September 2007 and is responsible for the organisation’s legal strategy for helping immigration detainees apply to get out of detention, as well as for its Article 8 Deportation Advice Project. 

Dr Bronwen Manby is a Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre, LSE. She has written on human rights issues in Africa, particularly in South Africa and Nigeria (especially the oil industry in the Niger Delta), and in continental developments in human rights law. Recently, she has worked mainly on statelessness, comparative nationality law, and legal identity, and collaborated with UNHCR on its global campaign against statelessness.

Bronwen has degrees from Oxford and Columbia Universities, is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales, and in 2015 was awarded a doctorate by Maastricht University faculty of law: Citizenship and Statelessness in Africa: The Law and Politics of Belonging.

At the Middle East Centre, Bronwen is Principal Investigator on the research project Preventing Statelessness among Migrants in North Africa and their Children: Role of Host and Sending States in Providing Birth Registration and Identity Documents.

Erica Masiero is a volunteer at the conference with an interest in human rights, statelessness and anthropology. She used to work with different international NGOs in Africa and in Asia, as well as on prevention of statelessness with UNHCR in Sudan.

She recently completed a Master in Diaspora and Migration Studies at SOAS with a dissertation on the Kuwaiti bidoon in the UK.

Aisling Morgan is an Alumna of University of Liverpool, and former Liverpool Law Clinic student. She has an LLM from University of Nottingham in International Criminal Justice and Armed Conflict.

Aisling is currently working as a Policy Adviser in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with policy responsibility for matters relating to Company Law framework, and is interested in matters of International Humanitarian Law and post-conflict development.

Nina Murray is Head of Policy & Research at the European Network on Statelessness (ENS), a civil society alliance of over 120 NGOs, academics and individual experts in 40 countries, committed to addressing statelessness in Europe. She currently coordinates projects on Roma statelessness, detention, forced migration and statelessness, and leads the development of ENS’ new Statelessness Index.

Prior to joining ENS, Nina worked at Scottish Refugee Council for over six years, and has extensive experience leading research, advocacy and community development projects with a focus on gender and refugee rights. She has held a range of other professional and voluntary roles in the human rights field.

Chris Nash is the Director and co-founder of the European Network on Statelessness (www.statelessness.eu). He has been instrumental in the Home Office devising and implementing the statelessness determination and grant of leave procedure in the UK.

He has worked in the refugee and migration field for 20 years, initially as an asylum lawyer and then at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (Head of Policy and Advocacy), the Refugee Council of Australia (National Policy Director), Amnesty International (Head of Refugee and Migrant Rights Team) and Asylum Aid (International Protection Policy Coordinator).

He has written widely on asylum, migration and statelessness policy, and is joint author of the 2011 UNHCR/Asylum Aid report Mapping Statelessness in the United Kingdom. 

Cynthia Orchard is the Statelessness Policy and Casework Coordinator at Asylum Aid, part of Migrants Resource Centre (MRC), and MRC's representative on the Advisory Committee of the European Network on Statelessness. Cynthia has worked previously with UNHCR, Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, the Immigration Advisory Service, and several other NGOs, and she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast.

Cynthia is registered with the UK’s Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner to give legal advice in asylum and statelessness matters. She is also qualified as a lawyer in Virginia and has Master of Studies degree (International Human Rights Law, University of Oxford), Juris Doctor (University of Virginia), and Bachelor of Arts (Political Science, University of California at Santa Barbara).

Cynthia has written numerous articles and briefings on human rights, asylum, migration, and statelessness. She tweets mostly about these topics @CynthiaOrchard.

Devyani Prabhat is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School, UK, with legal practice experience in Constitutional law. She holds a LL.M and a PhD from New York University. At present, she researches and teaches Migration, Citizenship and Nationality from a socio-legal and comparative perspective. She is an ESRC research grant holder on British Citizenship and the Practice of Nationality laws.

The project focuses on the processes of gaining, holding and losing of citizenship and the role of nationality law practice for long term residents or British citizens. She supervises doctoral students researching on citizenship, migration, children's rights, human rights, the legal profession, and sociolegal theory and methods.

Dr Prabhat's book Unleashing the Force of Law: Legal Mobilization, National Security, Basic Freedoms (Palgrave Macmillan Socio-legal Studies Series) has won the Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (Society of Legal Scholars ) 2017. The book was shortlisted by both the Society of Legal Scholars (2017) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (2016) for book prize awards.

Her latest book on British Citizenship with Policy Press (2018) titled Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship is available open access at http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=647390