FAMILY Frontiers has filed a constitutional challenge at the high court, seeking a declaration Malaysian women married to foreign spouses can automatically confer citizenship on their children who are born overseas.

The group, known as Association of Family Support and Welfare Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, said it aimed to uphold the spirit of the federal constitution, which, promotes equality and, explicitly under Article 8(2), prohibits discrimination, including on the basis of gender.

“Currently, overseas-born children of Malaysian women with non-citizen spouses are unable to acquire Malaysian citizenship ‘by operation of law’.

“Malaysia is one of only 25 countries worldwide that does not grant women the right to confer nationality on their children on an equal basis as men.

“Since the turn of the century, 19 countries have amended discriminatory provisions towards equality in nationality rights. In 2006, Indonesia reformed its nationality law to uphold comprehensive gender equality, making Malaysia and Brunei the only nations in Asean to maintain gender-discriminatory citizenship laws,” its president Suriani Kempe said in a statement.

Family Frontiers, along with six Malaysian mothers, filed the challenge, naming the federal government as the sole defendant.

The seven plaintiffs are, among others, seeking a declaration that Article 14(1)(b) of the federal constitution, read with the Second Schedule, Part II, section 1(c) is discriminatory and in violation of Article 8, in that it confers citizenship on a child born outside the federation whose father, but not the mother, is at the time of the birth a citizen.

According to a mapping project by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees Malaysia, there were 12,400 stateless persons residing in Peninsular Malaysia in 2017. A total of 12,078 had applied for citizenship with the National Registration Department while 2,359 have acquired citizenships.

The issue of statelessness is a legacy problem that has affected Malaysian Indians the most as many were born in the estates and had no means of registering themselves. – December 18, 2020.