6 INTRODUCTION Prison bars - depicted on the cover of the report, are all-to-frequent an experience of modern Bidoon (Bedoon, Bidun etc.) life. Members of the Bidoon community face arbitrary force and punishment if they attempt to mobilise. Most people interviewed for this report claimed they feared being imprisoned if they protested, leaving them feeling powerless within the country. As one respondent to the project survey lamented, they are ‘shackled and have nothing but a pen and a word’. This stifling sense of inhibition weaves itself into the account set out below. This report explores the life experiences of members of Kuwait’s stateless Bidoon community during the Covid-19 pandemic, from its emergence around March 2020 to around January 2022. It seeks to provide a qualitative snapshot of the lives of those who took part in the project by exploring whether and how their experiences could have been shaped by their socio-legal status and what the impact of that experience might have been. It derives recommendations based on the experiences shared with the SALAM DHR project team. The report is the culmination of a pilot research-based action advocacy project on Kuwait carried out as part of an initiative entitled the COVID19 (Covid-19) Emergency Statelessness Fund Consortium, or CESF.2 The Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) created the CESF, or Fund in June 2020, to respond to the ‘life threatening marginalisation, with potentially disastrous consequences’, that stateless people faced in the context of COVID-19, as warned of in the joint civil society statement In solidarity with the stateless, issued by 84 organisations in June 2020. Many of the concerns articulated in the joint statement were in turn documented and evidenced in ISI’s 2020 Impact Report, entitled Stateless in a Global Pandemic, also published in June 2020. The project period encompassed pre-existing and ongoing contextual and socio-political developments: the pandemic did not occur in a vacuum. Participants told us that these factors impacted on the health and well-being of members of the stateless community during the pandemic. Kuwait is a state party to seven legally binding international human rights treaties.3 While this project is not about the GoK’s general adherence to international human rights standards, we consider treaty bodies’ observations where they appear to have had a bearing on how the GoK has behaved towards members of the stateless Bidoon community and their right to civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights during the pandemic. This includes physical and mental health outcomes, as expressed by participants in this study. ABOUT THE BIDOON AND THEIR LEGAL STATUS IN KUWAIT Limit or restriction – This picture of a Bidoon man with a flag wrapped tightly round him, as depicted in the cover image – is symbolic of the arbitrary limits and restrictions on the actions of the stateless people, that the state imposes on them. These limits are justified on the basis of their precarious legal status, even though this precarity has been manufactured by the state. The stateless Bidoon community in Kuwait are currently defined as ‘illegal residents’ by the Government of Kuwait (GoK). As set out below, the description of the stateless community’s status, and their place in society, has changed since Kuwait’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1961. They have been characterised as ‘illegal residents’ by the GoK since 2010. See, for example, https://www.institutesi.org/pages/cesf-projects for more information on the CESF initiative. The CAT - Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, CCPR - International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, CED - Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, CEDAW - Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, CERD - International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, CESCR - International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, CMW - International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, CRC - Convention on the Rights of the Child, and CRPD - Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 2 3