Recent proposals to amend the citizenship laws of Malaysia are seen as benefiting women and mothers, but others are critiqued as potentially removing safeguards for vulnerable groups and leading to more stateless people.
For decades, Malaysia’s existing citizenship laws have been seen as unfair and discriminatory against women. Currently, the Federal Constitution grants automatic Malaysian citizenship to children born overseas only to Malaysian men with foreign wives, but not to Malaysian women with foreign husbands despite Malaysian Court decisions.
Several months ago, the Malaysian government began proposing constitutional amendments that would enable women and mothers to automatically confer citizenship to children born abroad. While this is seen as a positive move, there are also five new law proposals that have been labeled as regressive by opponents of the move.
They argue that this would remove safeguards and potentially keep current citizens in a perpetual cycle of statelessness.
For example, one federal constitutional article amendment proposes to delete the words “permanently resident”. By doing so, civil society groups argue that children born to Malaysian permanent residents who are stateless will no longer have access to automatic citizenship. Past court cases have demonstrated that stateless Malaysian residents are often deprived of access to education, healthcare, employment, housing and social security as a result.
Statelessness is an issue in Malaysia. It may affect refugees such as the Rohingya people who fled Myanmar. But it also affects children born in Malaysia to Malaysian parents, except that they have no birth certificate because, for instance, they were conceived out of wedlock and therefore not registered. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there were still 12,400 stateless people in Malaysia in 2017.
Another amendment proposal seeks to modify the article granting citizenship to abandoned children.
“There needs to be elements of investigation, checks, so by operation of law there is still room for them to register as citizens,” says Saifuddin Nasution Ismail, Malaysia’s Minister of Home Affairs. “This is what some of the NGOs are finding it hard to accept.”
Civil groups have voiced their objections to the proposed constitutional amendments that would also affect children born out of wedlock to Malaysian fathers, stateless children adopted by Malaysian parents, foundlings or children who were abandoned (including those abandoned upon birth), and families with generations of stateless children born in Malaysia.
For the president of the Malaysian Bar, Karen Cheah, the proposed amendments may lead to more people becoming stateless.
In response, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim recently said they had been presented to Malaysia’s Conference Of Rulers, which includes the rulers and the governors of the Malay States, and called for any decision by the rulers to be respected.
Any amendment to the Federal Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives) in order to be passed.
The current government has also announced that they will study recent proposals to create laws for dual citizenship, which is currently not recognized in Malaysia. At the moment, one must renounce their previous nationality to become a citizen of Malaysia.
