KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 — If you are born in Malaysia and are a Malaysian, do you take it for granted that your children and grandchildren will also be Malaysians and enjoy the...
KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 — If you are born in Malaysia and are a Malaysian, do you take it for granted that your children and grandchildren will also be Malaysians and enjoy the same privileges as you?
Each new generation of this Perak family now inherits the same stateless status and its harsh consequences of being stuck in a cycle of hardship and being deprived of what Malaysians enjoy: access to education, job opportunities, affordable healthcare and more. When Vathumalai and Letchimee were young, their stepfather pawned their birth certificates to a moneylender to borrow money.
Without an identity card, Kamaladevi’s mother Letchimee could not register her marriage with her Malaysian husband at the National Registration Department , which caused Kamaladevi to be considered an illegitimate child or a child born out of wedlock. With Kamaladevi’s Malaysian father being sick and with his death in 1988, the family had to stay at relatives’ houses and faced financial hardship, with Kamaladevi being taught rubber tapping and having to start working at the age of 12 with her cousin at the estate.
Kamaladevi’s husband died in October 2009 and the family left behind experienced hardship worsened by their stateless status, including limited job prospects due to discrimination and deprived of the same social protections and support or benefits that Malaysians enjoy. Kamaladevi’s daughter T’s birth at Hospital Teluk Intan was registered late and she was given a birth certificate in May 2009, which stated her citizenship status to be “Kamaladevi’s daughter T could attend school as a child, but she was not given equal opportunity to education and was denied permission to even register for the qualifying examination of PMR in Form Three of secondary school — simply because she lacks Malaysian citizenship.
T gave birth to three children at hospitals in Taiping and Ipoh but faced the “cruel reality” of seeing their birth certificates also stating their citizenship status as “T’s three children — or Kamaladevi’s grandchildren — too have become stateless, and also face the same lack of education opportunities and equal access to affordable healthcare.
“Due to my lack of citizenship, banks are unwilling to provide me with a loan, depriving me of the means to improve my life and enhance my standard of living; thus, keeping me trapped in a cycle of limited opportunities,” he said, adding that his stateless status has also affected his mental health and left him depressed.
Maalini said it is important to recognise the existence of childhood statelessness in Malaysia which could be contributed to by system bureaucracy and said being stateless results in having “few avenues for upward mobility, leaving generation after generation to toil in poverty and obscurity”. “It’s important to seek assistance from trusted persons, or get peer support from stateless communities and connecting to other stateless persons who may inspire them and provide hope and help them shift from feeling bitter or defeated,” she said.
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