Time To Restore The Right Of Citizenship By Birth

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From Stephen Ng
The story of Rohana Abdullah, an abandoned child of Malaysian and Indonesian parentage being raised by a former school teacher, is heart-warming, reflecting the true Malaysian spirit.
The girl was brought up by Chee Hoi Lan, now 83, who went the extra mile to care for her. Rohana, in turn, is making every effort to ensure that her adopted mother is well taken care of while she relocates to Melaka to pursue her education.
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Chee should be nominated as the Mother of the Year. The bond between Chee and Rohana is simply amazing. This is indeed the spirit of true humanity. It has, and will always remain a Malaysian thing, except that its light has always been clouded by the politics of racism.
Why do we still have so many cases of stateless people in Malaysia?
When Kepong MP Lim Lip Eng offered to help stateless people, there was a long queue outside his centre.
The problem with Pakatan Harapan at the time was that there were people like Muhyiddin Yassin, who placed their political careers above the people’s problems.
I wrote an open letter about a number of cases to Muhyiddin, then home minister. It was ignored. He also ignored a former senior Cabinet colleague, refusing to respond to her text messages on stateless children.
Muhyiddin’s failure to respond is not surprising but a big contrast was the response of then foreign minister Anifah Aman who immediately reached out to the family of a Malaysian woman stranded in China with her son, after the woman’s sister, Myra Cheng, wrote a letter published by FMT.
After several months, and regular updates from Anifah, one midnight Myra phoned to say her sister and nephew had landed at KLIA. The family thanked Anifah profusely for his willingness to follow up with his counterpart in China on two occasions before the mother-and-son were allowed to leave China.
In my letter to Muhyiddin, I wrote about a stateless girl, Belle Chok (real name withheld), who suffers from lupus but is not entitled to free medical treatment at local hospitals.
Muhyiddin did nothing about it. Instead, it was Dzulkefly Ahmad and Dr Lee Boon Chye (then health minister and deputy minister respectively) who decided that all children below 12 years old, citizen or otherwise, should be entitled to medical treatment.
Belle is 14 years old, and still stateless. Her medication works out to about RM800 every month. She has been trying to raise her own funds by selling her artwork. How much longer does she have to wait before she obtains citizenship?
Many people are irked that young people like Rohana, Belle and many others are languishing without their citizenship being resolved, while we recall that a royal commission of inquiry in 2014 revealed that thousands of people in Sabah, many foreigners, were given citizenship with the stroke of the pen during former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s time. Until today, the perpetrators have not been charged in court.
The current problem of stateless people has its roots in an amendment to the Federal Constitution in 1962, when the principle of jus soli (citizenship by birth) was changed to that of jus sanguinis (citizenship by parentage).
The parliamentary debates are recorded in the Hansard of 31 January 1962.
It is time for a reset, and to restore the law to the original principle of jus soli. While that may require a lot of political will, at the very least, the prime minister should end the misery of the many cases similar to those of Rohana and Belle – where either parent is a Malaysian – and provide them the right to citizenship. - FMT
Stephen Ng is an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.

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