KOTA KINABALU – The issue of statelessness in Sabah will be dealt with separately from constitutional amendments to resolve the citizenship woes of overseas-born children of Malaysian women, a federal minister from the state, Datuk Ewon Benedick said.
The constitutional amendments will have no effect on Sabah’s stateless persons, which is an issue being dealt with by a separate cabinet committee, the entrepreneur development and cooperative minister told The Vibes.
Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor and Home Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail are chairing the separate committee, Ewon added.
“The stateless problem in Sabah involving illegal immigrants is a separate issue. I have told the cabinet this and they fully agreed to look into this matter separately.
“The proposed amendment of the constitution only involves parents with clear citizenship. There is another cabinet committee looking into issues relating to illegal immigration in Sabah,” he added.
Statelessness in Sabah, which lies close to islands of the southern Philippines, involves intermarriages between locals with undocumented migrants. These relationships have resulted in thousands of children facing difficulty in obtaining citizenship since one parent does not possess identity papers.
Children are also made stateless when these relationships result in their birth before the parents register their marriage.
The government is making amendments to the federal constitution to grant Malaysian mothers equal rights to confer citizenship on their children who are born overseas.
The amendments will see the words “whose father” replaced with “at least one of the parents”. This replacement will be in Part I and Part II of the Second Schedule of the federal constitution.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim yesterday said he would be presenting the draft amendments to the Conference of Rulers soon, after which they would be tabled in Parliament in September.
However, civil society has slammed other proposed amendments that they say will worsen the problem of statelessness.
These will see the removal of provisions protecting persons from becoming stateless, such as a provision that ensures the “jus soli” principle – or birthright citizenship – and a provision that protects abandoned newborn children.
Lawyers for Liberty had called these other proposed amendments “dangerous, unjust, and cruel”, which would affect those who are born and who have lived in Malaysia for generations but are without proper documentation to obtain a blue MyKad.
In Sabah, records of the state’s Islamic Religious Affairs Department show that close to 19,781 Muslim non-citizens married local Muslims from the year 2000 to 2012.
The statistics revealed that more non-citizen women opted to marry local men in Sabah (10,922), compared to 8,859 non-citizen men marrying local women over the same period. – The Vibes, July 11, 2023
