Malaysian Citizenship Bill Exposes Flaws in Moderating Between Progressive and Regressive Ideals
When to the moment I shall say, "Linger awhile! so fair thou art!" Then mayst thou fetter me straightway, Then to the abyss will I depart! - Goethe’s Faust
The stage was set. The chairperson of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Children, Women and Community (JKWPM) called a ‘historic moment.’ MP Yeo Bee Yin would go on in the course of her speech to declaim ‘saya anak Malaysia’ [I am a child of Malaysia] four times. Prior to that the former deputy minister of the Women Ministry announced ‘we can return home to our respective families and proudly inform our daughters that I as a mother or father was involved in drafting this law.’ This was MP Hannah Yeoh, who is now Sports Minister. Speaking of her cabinet colleague, Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution, she claimed that he possessed both ‘the political determination' and ‘the moral strength' to introduce the amendment bill. Another MP from the government coalition welcomed the bill by reciting a poem on sentimental love for the country. Then came the vote and the House burst into applause when the results were announced. An overwhelming 206 Government and opposition MPs voted for the bill against one dissenting MP.
It was a Faustian moment. MPs lingered on after the applause. Group photos followed, one Government MP even posing solo with the bill.
Thus concluded what had been a year-long consultative process. The Home Ministry had initially wanted seven changes to citizenship provisions in the Constitution. Some of these changes were ill-conceived, such as the removal of automatic citizenship for persons born in Malaysia but not recognised as citizens of any other country. Had this absurd amendment been passed, it would have led to the ‘collapse of the last barrier protecting children against statelessness in Malaysia,’ as the JKWPM chairperson herself acknowledged.
The government yielded on this point in the second draft. Then there was the outrageous proposal to abolish the automatic recognition of foundlings as Malaysian citizens. After intense criticism, this position too had to be walked back.
Why then did not Malaysian MPs, especially moderates like Yeo and Hannah, simply reject the bill until it had met their expectations? Or is that only what progressives do? As JKWPM chairperson, Yeo was right to acknowledge the serious concerns both inside and outside the House, prior to these concessions. Why then did a major concern like the removal of the right of children of Malaysian permanent residents to automatic citizenship still remain on the bill and not receive the opposition it deserved? Was Yeo right when she claimed that "the Home Ministry and the NGOs have very different perspectives and concerns"? Even on that front, there was rapprochement. The NGOs had made an inexplicable compromise.
The NGOs had proposed the exclusion of the children of immigrant PR holders from automatic citizenship. The Malaysian Citizenship Rights Alliance (MCRA) - claiming to represent more than a hundred NGOs - had proposed that in the case of 'an immigrant who comes to Malaysia who is given a red IC [permanent residency], we accept that their children should have to apply for citizenship.' It was a needless counter-proposal. Had the proposal been accepted it would have meant that only the children of local-born PR holders would become citizens by operation of law. The children of foreign-born PR holders could only become citizens by registration.
However, as one Government MP from Sungai Petani, aptly noted, the registration process itself was a problem. ‘All this while,’ he deplored, ‘it is the bureaucratic processes which are complicated and difficult that actually resulted in the process of citizenship not progressing smoothly.’ The hassle of citizenship by registration, instead of by operation of law, would have defeated many applicants, especially if they were foreign-born and less familiar with the bureaucratic norms in Malaysia.
Perhaps the sole purpose of the counter-proposal was to serve as a concession targeted at the Government and their moderate MPs. Or was MCRA sold on the Government’s argument that the children of immigrant PR holders were entitled to their parent’s foreign nationality, and were therefore not at risk of statelessness? That the ‘influx of 3.5 million foreigners’ made this amendment both urgent and necessary?1
NGOs can’t vote but even a hundred NGOs might not have made a difference. Only one MP out of the 200-odd members of the House, from Malaysia’s Youth Party, voted against the bill. Mr. Syed Saddiq was himself a former Youth Minister and now an opposition MP. Through his parliamentary speech in the run up to the vote, he rightly intuited that “the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions” and again “let us not for the sake of one good cause open the door to three or four evils.” It was an earnest plea to avoid a Faustian Pakt mit dem Teufel!
What is this one good and three or four evils to which Syed Saddiq refers? The latter were the remaining regressive amendments that were needlessly tacked on to what was formerly a progressive and hugely popular constitutional amendment for gender equality. Malaysian women with foreign spouses were seeking the equal right to automatically pass down their nationality to their overseas-born children. Malaysian men with foreign spouses and overseas-born children can presently do so automatically. Instead, the mothers found out that not only would they be granted their petition but that the Government would attempt use the occasion to restrict the citizenship claims of other vulnerable groups, including the children of permanent residents.
Even Malaysia’s Human Rights Commission (Suhakam), whose members have been noticeably conservative and even muted on crucial occasions in recent years, was acutely aware of the magnitude of the problem. ‘The rights to citizenship’ the Commission reminisced ‘that has been entrenched in the Federal Constitution through the wisdom of our forefathers should not be taken away by way of any amendment to the Constitution….’ It further rightly intuited that
the amendment to the Federal Constitution on citizenship rights should be in the spirit of enhancing these rights and not directed to taking away or diluting these rights. It remains our concern that the removal of the right to automatic citizenship of children born to permanent residents would only exacerbate the problem of statelessness.2
Progressives would thus have baulked at the Faustian bargain contracted in the House of Representatives that ‘historic’ day. They would have heard moderate and liberal MPs talk about the bill’s flaws, and propose perfunctory procedural remedies as an antidote. And yet proceed to vote in its favour! Hannah Yeoh noted, “to get everything that we struggle for, sometimes we have to start with the first step. This is the first, bold step. If we cannot get all that we want, don’t [just] let go of everything” while conceding that ‘these amendments are possibly not a hundred per cent.’ She warned her fellow parliamentarians who did not support the amendments that
considering that women make up more than 50% of the population, the failure of Members of Parliament to support this amendment will surely be remembered by them in the next general elections.
A couple of Sabah MPs ventured to claim that the bill needed the prior assent of Sabah’s head of state. Suhakam seized upon this point claiming the ‘disarray of the government in the preparation of this bill’ while urging ‘the Government to seriously reconsider the removal of present automatic right to citizenship of children born within Malaysia to permanent residents.’ That, however, was the main contribution to the Parliamentary debate from the Malaysian state which is among the most greatly affected by the presence of long-term immigrant-residents.
It did helped though that former chief minister and Sabah MP Datuk Seri Panglima Hj Shafie Aqdal made an enlightening intervention by discussing the documents held by immigrant-residents in Sabah. He reminded the audience of the origins of the documents known as the census certificate, the burung-burung card, and, most significantly, the IMM13. While the first two were respectively issued by the Council on National Security (MKN) and the Chief Minister’s department, respectively, the last was issued through an exemption order of Malaysia’s Immigration Act.
It was the document for war refugees! Sabah welcomed over a hundred thousand refugees from the civil war in the southern Philippines beginning in the 1970s. They and their descendants, many of whom never returned home, still hold on to this document. Those who hold the three documents therefore number 47,518, 36,892, and 51,645, respectively. That is a massive number of people who are long-term residents in Sabah and have yet to be formally recognised with any permanent status. And there are some of their descendants who have trouble proving they are the children and grandchildren of the original IMM13 holders. This is especially the case for those whose progenitors did not bother to renew or pass down their documentation. They also have trouble proving they were born in Sabah, Malaysia.
The Government thus didn’t just ‘open the door to three or four evils.’ They also slammed it shut on the descendants of Sabah’s de facto permanent residents of foreign birth! The Sabah situation is an evolving one for both de jure and de facto permanent residents. It may yet yield an accommodating arrangement towards the descendants of foreign-born long-term residents. It would have been better, as per the aforementioned Suhakam statements above, to err on the side of caution. Government MPs might claim that such descendants are already covered under sections 1(e) of the Second Schedule, Part II. However, it is usually the case that testimonies of ascendants (parents and grandparents) contribute a convincing part of the historical evidence needed for recognition. Apart from the important role they play as care-givers, ascendants who have been long-term residents in Sabah can vouch for their Sabah-born grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
There was thus simply no need for this modification or counter-proposal from the NGO side. The architects of the Malaysian constitution did not see it fit to discriminate between local and foreign PR holders. There was no reason for ‘civil society’ to walk back such a liberal and compassionate constitutional provision towards the children of permanent immigrant-residents. Unfortunately, a press-statement issued after the successful passage of the bill by the much-touted Malaysian NGO Family Frontiers also seemed to reflect this stance of differentiating between local- and foreign-born permanent residents.
Equally concerning are the three regressive amendments, that remain bundled with the progressive amendment for mothers. These include the removal of automatic citizenship for children of stateless local-born Permanent Residence holders….
Is it progressive or regressive to withhold the right of the children of immigrant PR holders to automatic citizenship? Does piece of paper make one a citizen? A person may be a native speaker of one of several East Coast Sabah languages, with all the familial and friendship ties that this entails. However, it is entirely possible that the same person might also be born of long-term residents of foreign birth. By closing any possibility of national recognition for the children of foreign-born long-term residents, do Malaysian moderate MPs and NGO activists - supposedly holding ‘very different perspectives’ - think this surmounts the problem of persons at risk of statelessness in Sabah and Malaysia?
On the day after the bill was successfully passed, one of the mothers of Family Frontiers wrote on her social media timeline
This morning a fellow mother called me, upon finding out the non-retroactive nature of the amendment, nangis teresak-esak [crying uncontrollably] while everyone was congratulating her.. oh lord, please give us strength to go thru this.3
More bad news was in store. At the end of October, it was announced that if any of these mothers were PR holders in a foreign country, this would affect their children’s citizenship application. This is because “[e]ven if the mother does not intend to acquire foreign citizenship’ the Government would need to ‘tak[e] into account the intention to reside long term in that country and aspects of loyalty to Malaysia….” In response, Family Frontiers and another Malaysian advocacy group, Malaysian Mothers’ Network, claimed that “nearly 80% of recent rejections within their networks involve Malaysian mothers holding permanent residence in other countries.“ They further elaborated that “this development appears to signify a worrisome interpretation of PR as indicative of ‘foreign allegiance.’” It appears that the Government will therefore continue to distinguish between Malaysian mothers and fathers.
So much for gender equality. When you deal with Mephistopheles, you have to pay his dues.
Thus, educated Malaysians are finding it hard - even with the favourable winds of politics behind them - to surmount the political and bureaucratic hurdles required for registering citizenship for their children. For the children of long-term foreign-born residents, especially those in Sabah, the day may never arrive when their automatic right to citizenship is given. However, the Government and their moderate MPs in Parliament have made sure that even if their parents’ status as long-term residents progresses to permanent residency, these children will not directly benefit from it. This is not progressive politics. It is not modernity. It is regression.
How to cite this article:
Sanen Marshall, 2024 ‘Malaysian Citizenship Bill Exposes Flaws in Moderation Between Progressive and Regressive Ideals’ The Semporna Sentinel 21st October
https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2024/03/27/home-minister-cites-35-million-foreigners-as-reason-to-stop-automatic-citizenship-for-permanent-residents-kids-insists-wont-make-them-stateless/125880
https://suhakam.org.my/2024/10/press-statement-no-23-2024_constitutional-amendment-bill-of-citizenship-clauses/
https://x.com/estherjohor/status/1847165675791679603?s=46&t=5-KQ5B7aV7wXNkvPb2k3a