MUAR, Nov 8 — Barisan Nasional was disingenuous in offering automatic citizenship to children born abroad to Malaysian women with foreign spouses as it was the government blocking this in court, Muda president Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman said today.
Condemning the coalition for using the emotive issue in its 15th general election manifesto launched last night, the former minister said the matter would have been moot had the BN government not appealed the High Court decision affirming this right previously.
Syed Saddiq said he was moved to comment on the BN manifesto pledged as the topic was “close to [his] heart”.
“Do you want to know why this issue reached the Federal Court? Because at that time, the government itself appealed this case until Malaysian children born to Malaysian women were denied citizenship rights.
“And at that time, the prime minister was an Umno-BN man himself! If the Cabinet had not continued the appeal for this issue, these children would have already received their citizenships,” he said, referring to caretaker prime minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob.
Syed Saddiq said as the government of the day, the BN administration could easily have prevented the heartache and stress of the families trying to win citizenship for their children, with some still unresolved after decades.
He then denounced the coalition for having the brazenness to now turn around and claim it would champion the same Malaysian women it has made to trudge repeatedly to the courts and National Registration Department just to seek equal rights as Malaysian men.
“Are we willing to gamble the fate of these Malaysian children in their hands again?” Syed Saddiq asked.
In the manifesto BN chairman Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi launched last night, the coalition promised, among others, to make the needed legal amendments to grant Malaysian women the same automatic right to confer citizenships to their offspring as Malaysian men.
In his speech, Ahmad Zahid said that “in the name of inclusivity”, BN no longer wanted children born through mixed marriages, or those with different ethnic and religious identities to be denied the right to make Malaysia their home.
On September 9, 2021, the High Court issued a landmark decision that Malaysian mothers’ foreign-born children are entitled to be Malaysian citizens by law, and ordered the Malaysian authorities to issue citizenship documents to these overseas-born children.
Despite calls for it to let the decision stand, the government appealed the matter, leading to the Court of Appeal overturning the ruling in August 5 this year, effectively denying the Malaysian women the same right that Malaysian men enjoyed automatically.
The plaintiffs in the case subsequently appealed the matter to the Federal Court, which has set December 14 to hear the application for leave to appeal.
