In September 2021, a landmark ruling was made: Malaysian mothers could finally confer their citizenship to their overseas-born children. Why did it make headlines? Because previously, only Malaysian fathers had the automatic right to pass on their citizenship to their children. But on February 17 2023, the Cabinet finally made a long overdue decision: they agreed to amend the Federal Constitution, which allows Malaysian mothers to automatically confer citizenship to their overseas-born children. While a landmark decision and a step towards acknowledging the disparity in gender equality, there is a lot of work to be done still. Because it bears mentioning that the first ruling was overturned in August 2022, as the Court of Appeal deemed that the provisions pertaining to those who are legible to confer citizenship to overseas-born children can only apply to “fathers”, and that the term could not be extended to mothers.
Disclosed by the National Registration Department, from 2013 to 2018, over 10,000 applications by Malaysian mothers were made, but only 142 were approved while the rest were either rejected due to undisclosed reasons or left pending. This didn’t just impact the mothers, but their children too as they couldn’t benefit from local healthcare and education systems.
Though there is progress in the fight for equal citizenship rights, the amendment still needs to be passed in parliament by a two-thirds majority vote. Suriani Kempe and Rekha Sen, two of the many mothers in Family Frontiers, the organisation that spearheaded the fight against the discriminatory practices that Malaysian mothers faced, were
