COMMENT | Govt must be meticulous to solve child citizenship

COMMENT | The government is on the right track by agreeing to amend the law to grant citizenship to children born overseas to Malaysian mothers.

As rightly pointed out by one of our top constitutional experts - Prof Shad Saleem - the proposed amendment would “consign to the dustbin of history the intolerable gender discrimination between Malaysian men and women if their children are born abroad.”

Under the present law, if a child is born overseas to a Malaysian father and a foreign wife, the child is constitutionally entitled to inherit the father’s citizenship.

On the contrary, when a Malaysian mother - in a lawful marriage with a foreigner - gives birth overseas to a child from the foreign father, the current law in the country will disown the child.

Thus, the child’s citizenship has to follow his or her father’s foreign citizenship.

It goes without saying that...