THAILAND A 2008 legislative amendment of the 1965 Nationality Act provided a pathway to Thai citizenship for individuals born in Thailand prior to 1992, and 2016 cabinet resolutions made around 80,000 stateless individuals eligible for naturalization: the children of parents belonging to Hmong, Mon, Karen and other hill tribes, as well as Rohingya ethnic communities (if those children were registered with the Ministry of Interior and had been living in Thailand for at least 15 years, or had attained a bachelor’s degree.63 Orphaned migrant children living in Thailand for 10 or more years who had certifications from relevant ministries were also made eligible for naturalization. MALAYSIA The Federal Constitution of Malaysia provides that children born in Malaysia “who [are] not born as a citizen of another country” and cannot acquire nationality of another country by registration within a year of their birth are citizens of Malaysia by operation of the law.64 The government of Malaysia has also extended efforts to enable access to birth registration with campaigns targeting stateless and undocumented persons, and, in 2017, by amending the country’s Birth Registration and Death Act—which requires that all births and deaths in the country be registered—to extend the time frame for registering births in a bid to increase overall registration rates.65 unable to benefit from these reforms. Positive experiences and examples to combat statelessness and ensure birth registration may nonetheless be instructive in this regard. The 2016 cabinet resolutions in Thailand provide a potential source of inspiration, as the effort did not only target refugees, but a broader group of stateless communities that included hill tribes and other ethnic minorities such as Karen, Hmong, Mon, and the Rohingya.66 Thailand has also had some success in reinstating the registration of births following periods during which the practice had stalled.67 In Malaysia, despite the broad, protective nature of the constitution’s wording, practitioners report that access to Malaysian citizenship for foundlings and otherwise stateless children is extremely limited in practice and dependent on lodging individual legal challenges, as well as on the discretion of High Court judges. While a small number of children have been able to access their right to Malaysian citizenship, court decisions in individual cases do not create a justiciable precedent, nor have they led to policy changes. 18 UND OING PRECARIT Y: ELE VATING P OSITIVE PR ACTICES FOR REFU GEE PROTECTION IN SO U TH AND SO U THE AST ASIA