Statelessness

In 2013 the Liverpool Law Clinic began its work on assisting people who are stateless and at risk of statelessness. There were several reasons for doing so. Firstly, the Home Office introduced a procedure in April 2013 for people to request leave to remain in the UK on the basis that they are stateless and not admissible to any other country. It was clear that there was a gap in provision of legal advice and assistance to people in this area.

Advice and representation on statelessness was outside scope of legal aid and in the first few years after the enactment of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 it was almost impossible to get discretionary legal aid by way of a grant of exceptional case funding.

Secondly, the Law Clinic is part of the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice. We teach law students though ‘enquiry-based learning’. Students work on real cases under the supervision of one of the Clinic lawyers. Four of the Clinic lawyers are immigration and asylum lawyers and the Clinic has a speciality in this area which is consistent with the social justice ethos of the Department. There is a synergy between our expertise, an identified need, and the opportunity to provide an interesting and informative clinical educational experience for our students.

Thirdly, the statelessness team at the Home Office is based in Liverpool and in this means that the Law Clinic is well placed to assist people at statelessness interviews. We have also been able to develop a constructive policy dialogue with the statelessness operations and policy teams and have met with them on a regular basis to discuss issues arising from the procedure.

Read the full report on Statelessness in Practice: Implementation of the UK Statelessness Application Procedure by Johanna Bezzano and Judith Carter, 2 July 2018 (PDF)

 

Statelessness: Theory and Practice

London, 9 - 10 July 2018.

 

PowerPoint Presentations from the Statelessness Conference


Statelessness and Removability - Advising people on ETD issues and cooperation:

 

 

Deportation orders and detention for people who are stateless and/or not removable:

 

 

Nationality and Statelessness in the International Law of Refugee Status:

 

 

Statelessness: challenges and opportunities, theory and practice:

 

 

Outsourcing Passports - Permanent "Temporary" Status in the UAE:

 

 

Ending Detention of Stateless People:

 

 

Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait:

 

 

UNHCR and Statelessness Determination in the UK:

 

 

Participant biographies 

Statelessness Conference delegates are listed alphabetically by surname below:

 

Back to: Liverpool Law School

    Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei - Director of Advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD)

    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 - Clinical Professor and Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at Boston University School of Law

    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 - Graduate Student in Social Justice & International Studies in Education, Dept of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta

    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 - a formerly stateless person from Kuwait and is the Chair and Director of the Kuwaiti Community Association

    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 - Senior Researcher at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion

    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 - Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Washington and Lee University School of Law

    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 - Founding director of Lingua Media Connect LTD

    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 - Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter

    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 - Immigration, asylum and human rights solicitor at Fadiga and Co

    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 - Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at Konstanz University

    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 - Liverpool Law Clinic solicitor with a background in immigration and asylum law.

    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 - Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University, UK

    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 - Head of Communications at the European Network on Statelessness (ENS)

    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 - In-house solicitor and lecturer at the Liverpool Law Clinic

    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 - Co-director & co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion

    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 - Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the West of England

    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

    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 - Lawyer at the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC)

    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 - Senior Protection Associate in UNHCR’s legal protection team

    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 - Director of the Refugee Programme, Hungarian Helskink Committee & President of the ENS

    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 - Practising barrister at No 5 Chambers and holds a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Civil Liberties Law

    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

    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 - Clinical instructor at the Boston University School of Law's International Human Rights Clinic

    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 - First elected to the European Parliament in 1999 as the Green Member for London

    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 - Member of Parliament for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East

    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 - Assistant Director at Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID)

    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 - Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre, LSE

    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 - Conference volunteer with a Masters in Diaspora and Migration Studies from SOAS

    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 - Alumna of University of Liverpool, and former Liverpool Law Clinic student

    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 - Head of Policy & Research at the European Network on Statelessness (ENS)

    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 - Director and co-founder of the European Network on Statelessness

    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 - Statelessness Policy and Casework Coordinator at Asylum Aid, part of Migrants Resource Centre (MRC)

    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 - Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School, UK

    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 

Statelessness panel discussion photograph by Erica Masiero.

 

Participant biographies continued

Statelessness Conference delegates are listed alphabetically by surname below:

Chloe Reddock - Conference volunteer studying at University of Liverpool

Chloe Reddock is a volunteer at the conference with an interest in human rights, international law and legal aid.

She will be soon graduating from the University of Liverpool and going on to complete the BPTC LLM at the University of Law Bloomsbury Campus in 2019.

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

Dr Julija Sardelić is currently 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.

Under the supervision of Professor Peter Vermeersch, she is conducting the MSC 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 and particularly focuses on the question of statelessness. 

Nando Sigona - Reader in International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham.

Nando Sigona is a Reader in International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham.

Most recently, he is co-author of Unravelling Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ (Policy Press, 2017) and Sans Papiers: The Social and Economic Lives of Young Undocumented Migrants (Pluto Press, 2014) and co-editor of Within and beyond citizenship (Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Kelly Staples - Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester.

Kelly Staples is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Manchester in 2008 for a thesis addressing the relationship between statelessness, international relations and political theory.

She is the author of Retheorising Statelessness: a background theory of membership in world politics, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2012, as well as articles on statelessness and political theory in Philosophy and Social Criticism and Res Publica.

Steve Valdez-Symonds - Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme Director at Amnesty International UK.

Steve Valdez-Symonds is the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme Director at Amnesty International UK.

He has worked on refugee and migrant rights for about 20 years, initially advising and representing people with asylum and immigration claims and appeals; later providing legal training and undertaking policy advocacy in relation to immigration, asylum and nationality law and practice including as Legal Officer at the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association for 6 years.  

Gonzalo Vargas Llosa - UNHCR's Representative in the UK.

Gonzalo Vargas Llosa joined UNHCR 24 years ago, and has been posted in Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Geneva, Panama, New York, the Dominican Republic and currently in London, where he is UNHCR's Representative in the UK.

He has also carried out short-term missions to Pakistan, Darfur and Libya. He was particularly exposed to the phenomenon of statelessness during his four-year posting in the Dominican Republic.

Sarah Woodhouse - Senior Lecturer in the Law Department at the University of Liverpool.

Sarah Woodhouse is a senior lecturer in the Law Department at the University of Liverpool, where most of her teaching takes place in the Liverpool Law Clinic. She is a solicitor specialising in immigration, asylum and human rights.

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

Previously she was head of the Immigration Department at Birnberg Peirce and Partners.  

Amanda Weston, QC - Barrister at Garden Court.

Amanda Weston, QC, barrister at Garden Court, practises across public and administrative law with an emphasis on civil liberties and vulnerable client groups. Her public law practice includes community care, mental health and mental capacity, unlawful detention, national security measures such as deprivation of citizenship, prison law, human rights and discrimination. She has particular experience in challenges to local and central government policy, rules and subordinate legislation.

Examples of her leading cases include McNally, and AHK. She is co-author of Jordan’s Judicial Review: A Practical Guide.

Her niche specialism is deprivation of citizenship and refusal of naturalisation for national security reasons.

Amanda spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Law in Action about deprivation of citizenship and the rule of law, on which she also writes and lectures. She is currently working on a number of cases addressing the impact of the new statutory ‘Prevent’ duty on public authorities’ decision-making.

Colin Yeo - Barrister at Garden Court Chambers

Colin Yeo is a barrister at Garden Court Chambers specialising in immigration law.

He also founded and edits the Free Movement website (freemovement.org.uk). 

Sheona York - Qualified solicitor at Kent Law Clinic

Sheona York is a qualified solicitor. She practised for nearly 30 years at Hammersmith & Fulham Community Law Centre and then as Principal Legal Office of the Immigration Advisory Service, specialising in immigration, asylum, asylum support and public law, taking a number of reported cases.

Since joining the Kent Law Clinic in 2012 she has supervised students in immigration and asylum cases where legal aid was not available, specialising in family applications including resisting removal and deportation, and pursuing cases for young unaccompanied ‘failed asylum-seekers’.

Sheona has a long-standing interest in removability, having acted for many years for Eritrean and Palestinian migrants who cannot practicably be ‘returned home’.

Statelessness panel discussion photograph by Erica Masiero.

 

Organisation profiles

The Statelessness conference was organised by Asylum Aid (now Consonant) and Liverpool Law Clinic. 

 

Consonant (formerly Asylum Aid)

Consonant (formerly Asylum Aid and Migrants Resource Centre), which has worked for over 30 years to help migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers overcome the barriers that prevent them from fully participating in British society. Asylum Aid has helped tens of thousands of people secure protection in the UK, regularise their immigration status, learn English, and find work. It provides free, confidential and independent legal advice and representation on asylum and statelessness. Team members who work directly with clients are regulated by the Immigration and Asylum Accreditation Scheme, and have extensive experience in asylum and immigration law. It particularly welcomes referrals for cases that have reached the appeal stage.

Consonant also runs a Statelessness Portal to provide useful information to stateless persons in the UK about British statelessness law and helpful resources. It can also be useful for lawyers, support workers, and others who encounter stateless persons.

 

Liverpool Law Clinic

 

The Liverpool Law Clinic is part of the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice. Under the supervision of an in-house legal team of qualified lawyers, final year Law students have direct, practical experience of advising or representing clients. The assistance it offers is intended to complement other legal provision and support services in the community to help with particular problem areas.

Since 2013, staff at the Law Clinic have been advising clients who are stateless or at risk of statelessness to make applications to the Home Office for leave to remain in the UK.