Homegrown Statelessness in Malaysia Malaysian citizenship and each time she was denied. Her fourth application was submitted in 2016 and she is still awaiting a result. 88 17S (Malaysian citizen of Chinese ethnicity) is the mother of a 14-year-old stateless girl. She detailed how she adopted her daughter from a clinic known for delivering babies by mothers who did not want to keep their babies. She said that the biological mother of her daughter is of Chinese ethnicity and was unwed. 17S says there is no information about the biological father other than that the biological parents were not married. When her daughter was around 12 years old, she took her to obtain her identity card at the registration office and discovered that her daughter’s birth certificate was fraudulent. The officer at the registration office told her that the clinic where her daughter was born was notorious for producing fraudulent documents and it raised a red flag with the registration office. The officer took the fraudulent birth certificate away and issued another one listing the child as a non-citizen. 17S engaged with a lawyer she read about online who represented stateless children. This lawyer assisted 17S in the legal adoption of her daughter and helped 17S’s daughter obtain a new birth certificate with 17S’s name on it as a parent. The new birth certificate lists 17S’s daughter as a non-citizen. She is now judicially reviewing this third birth certificate. 89 3L is a lawyer representing a stateless child, born in Malaysia, who was adopted by her two parents who are Malaysian citizens. The client’s biological parents were a Malaysian citizen and an Indonesian citizen. The lawyer brought an originating summons to declare her client a citizen and at the High Court level, the Court stated that the child was Indonesian. This case is currently being appealed to the Court of Appeal. 90 6L, another lawyer, explained that an NGO refers stateless cases to her to process adoptions of stateless persons or obtain legitimacy orders. 6L told me about a particularly troubling case wherein her client, a father of a stateless child, adopted his biological child in the hopes this would help the child obtain citizenship. The father, a Malaysian citizen of Indian ethnicity, was in a relationship with an Indonesian citizen who gave birth to their child. She subsequently left him with the child and left Malaysia and is untraceable. The child’s birth certificate details no names of the parents. Despite the father providing a DNA test to show he is the biological father of the child, he was still advised to adopt the child legally as, in law, his daughter was not seen as his legitimate child. This child was able to get citizenship in the end. 91 In this category, abandoned and adopted children should be able to benefit from the law in that they are all born within the Federation of Malaysia and also have a legal parent that is a Malaysian citizen. As 5L noted, when litigating such cases, the factual finding that a stateless person was born in Malaysia is rarely contested because birth certificates and adoption or legitimisation orders provide the documentary proof of birth within the country. In these cases, then, this fact of being born in Malaysia coupled with the intention and long-standing residence in the country provides a genuine and effective link to support citizenship by operation of law. As well, many cases also possess factual findings of a legal parent who is a Malaysian citizen, a further genuine and effective link. 88 89 90 91 Appendix Table 2, Interview with 5S. Appendix Table 2, Interview with 17S. Appendix Table 3, Interview with 3L. Appendix Table 3, Interview with 6L. 113