IN February, Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail and law and institutional reform minister Azalina Othman released a joint statement announcing that the cabinet had agreed to amend the Federal Constitution to enable automatic Malaysian citizenship to children born overseas to Malaysian mothers.

It was expected to be tabled in the current Dewan Rakyat meeting. With our country celebrating the International Women’s Day on March 8, the first since the new government took office, this is surely a welcoming step towards achieving gender equality.

However, this is only a small step in addressing the issue of statelessness among people who are supposed to be Malaysian citizens but became stateless due to various circumstances.

This coming constitutional amendment should provide an opportunity to the government and other parties to discuss and hopefully come up with solutions to this issue.

And there is actually one simple and straightforward solution that will actually help to solve many of the cases related to the citizenship issue: acknowledging DNA tests as primary evidence in determining someone’s paternity or maternity.

Currently, our Federal Constitution grants automatic citizenship to a person whose father is a Malaysian regardless of place of birth.

However, there are still many people who are stateless and unable to become a Malaysian citizen despite having a Malaysian father.

According to statistics provided by the Home Ministry, from 2012 to 2017, 15,394 children born in Malaysia were denied citizenship even when their fathers are Malaysia citizens.

How is this possible? This is mainly because of the bureaucratic red tape in the National Registration Department (NRD), mainly in relation to the lack of marriage certificates of the parents.

This is despite the fact that there is no provision under the Federal Constitution that expressly states that the marriage of a child’s parents must be officially registered to qualify them for citizenship.

On 16 February, when answering a question in parliament about whether or not a DNA test result is recognition of proof of a father-child relationship for the granting of citizenship, Saifuddin replied that a DNA test is only a supporting document as any application still has to follow other laws, particularly related to the registration of marriage.

This runs counter to a few recent court cases on the issue. In February 2022, the High Court ordered citizenship to be granted to Chia Yong Chai, who was born in Sabah to a Malaysian father and an Indonesian mother.

Chia had his citizenship application rejected because of the lack of marriage certificate of his parents, who married according to “adat kampung” (village custom), despite having done DNA tests to prove that he was the son of his father.

A similar judgment was made in the case of Wong Kueng Hui, born in Sabah to a Malaysian father from Sarawak and an Indonesian mother.

The High Court in October 2019 ordered Wong to be granted citizenship and the decision was affirmed by the Court of Appeal in January 2022.

In October 2022, the Federal Court opted not to hear the appeal by the government on Wong’s case, putting an end to the matter.

Chia and Wong’s cases have shown that, contrary to Saifuddin’s statement, the lack of a marriage certificate should not be considered fatal to a citizenship application.

It is understandable that the DNA test was originally not considered primary evidence of paternity, as the wide adoption of the technology only occurred in recent decades and was unheard of during our early years of independence.

However, to maintain such an attitude nowadays is absurd and regressive. We used to have a dream of becoming an advanced nation in 2020.

Instead, what we have become now is a country in which the government still has a “dinosaur” attitude of refusing to acknowledge parenthood testing based on widely recognised technology.

Our criminal justice system surely does not hesitate to rely on DNA tests when judging whether someone has committed a crime and should be jailed or even sentenced to capital punishment, as in the cases of murder and drug trafficking.

It is ironic that the government is quick to adopt the latest technology in matters related to whether someone should be jailed or sentenced to death but is slow and resistant to change when it comes to letting people, who are supposed to be Malaysian citizens according to our Federal Constitution, have a fulfilling life.

Of course, there are many other pending cases of citizenship application that could not be solved by DNA test alone. Adopting the technology, however, would be a vital step in reducing the backlog.

After these cases have been solved, we could have more time and resources to tackle other cases that call for more complicated solutions. – March 6, 2023.

* Rayner Sylvester Yeo is a member of Agora Society. He was born in Sabah and is currently residing in Kuala Lumpur. Having grown up in a mixed-ethnic, multi-faith family and spent his working life in public, private and non-profit sectors, he believes diversity is the spice of life.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.