If you watched the opening ceremony for the Olympic games in London, it was hard to miss the self-described \u201cindependent Olympians.\u201d There were four of them: Guor Marial, Philipine van Aanholt, Reginald de Windt, and Lee-Marvin Bonevacia. In a celebration of international competition, their presence stood out because they were, in effect, stateless.<\/p>\n
A stateless person is broadly defined as someone without a nationality. Though the UN\u2019s Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has a right to a nationality, there are an estimated 12 million people worldwide who are stateless; some estimates say that the number is closer to 20 million. That number would be substantially higher if the United Nations also counted Palestinians, according to Sebastian Kohn, a program officer at the Open Society Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe this is a serious issue in particular because of the link to other human rights violations,\u201d says Kohn. \u201cA big challenge in this field is that there are still relatively few actors working on this. We need to see a lot more action from governments, the UN, and civil society to try to address this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n So just how did this year\u2019s independent Olympians arrive at their statelessnes? As Deadspin pointed out<\/a> shortly after the ceremony, the reasons were both political and logistic: Guor Marial, a marathoner, was born into civil war in what is now South Sudan. The bloodshed claimed two million lives, including eight of Marial\u2019s siblings and 25 family members in total. The violence led him to flee the country at 8 years old, first to Kenya, then to Egypt, before finally settling in Arizona. South Sudan, the world\u2019s newest nation, has yet to form a national committee that\u2019s required for countries to participate in the games, and even though Sudan extended Marial an invitation to represent that country in the games, he refused.<\/p>\n \u201cSome things are more important than Olympic glory,\u201d he said recently. \u201cIf I ran for Sudan, I would be betraying my people. I would be dishonoring the two million people who died for our freedom. I want to bring honor to my country. People who just want glory, the spotlight of the Olympics, they don\u2019t care about other people. I\u2019m fighting for independent status because I do care. When I run, I want people to see me and say, \u2018He is from South Sudan.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n Still without a passport, Marial wasn\u2019t able to travel to London in time for the opening ceremony. So he watched like most of the rest of us did\u2014while eating pizza with friends in Flagstaff, Ariz.<\/p>\n Reginald de Windt, a judoka, Lee-Marvin Bonevacia, a distance runner, and Philipine van Aanholt, a sailor, are all from Curaco, a former country that was part of the Netherlands Antilles. The Netherlands Antilles dissolved itself as an independent nation back in 2010, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) no longer recognized it. Instead of competing under the Dutch flag, for which they held no real allegiance, the three athletes petitioned the committee to compete independently.<\/p>\n While these athletes aren\u2019t the first to compete independently at the Olympics, their stories mirror those of other stateless residents. Kohn, of the Open Society Institute, notes that the two main drivers of statelessness are discrimination and state secession, particularly in countries with often violent tensions between ethnic groups. In countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to pass on nationality to their offspring.<\/p>\n The impact of statelessness can be devastating.<\/p>\n