2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) calls to sign and ratify some of these conventions, Malaysia has cited it is not ready and still in consultation to ensure its preparedness to join as a signatory. Recently, Senator P Waytha Moorthy, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, has said that the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) wants Malaysia to ratify these six United Nations treaties pertaining to human rights. 39 Still, there has been no indication that the State of Malaysia will follow this recommendation. As Malaysia is not a signatory to many of the major international conventions related to human rights, there has been very little use of human rights language in domestic statelessness cases. Some advocates, who were interviewed, mentioned that the turn to human rights sometimes harmed a legal case involving a stateless person. 40 As the full menu of human rights instruments are not available and the use of human rights provisions or mechanisms have been met with hostility in some legal venues, the language of rights is not always a viable tool for stateless persons in Malaysia. With this in mind, this article focuses on what other factors could persuade the state to confer citizenship on different categories of stateless persons. In legal parlance, and in my discussions with advocates and stateless persons alike, a common argument made was that many stateless persons were de facto citizens in every sense of the word, except in the legal sense. This article suggests that the international legal concept of a ‘genuine and effective link’ could and should be deployed to convince states they have an obligation to confer citizenship on various categories of stateless persons in Malaysia. This research paper invites scholars and advocates alike to point to the ‘dominant and effective nationality’ test to be used in not only the dual nationality context but also the statelessness context. METHODOLOGY: INTERVIEWING LAWYERS, ADVOCATES AND STATELESS PERSONS The larger research project on which this paper is based engaged with the reported cases of stateless persons seeking citizenship and also involved oral interviews with experts, service providers and stateless persons themselves. The main reason why interviews were conducted is because many cases of statelessness are unreported and those that are reported, do not contain all the information I sought for this research project. Between 1 January 2018 and 26 April 2018, 44 people were interviewed in Malaysia for this project. I conducted unstructured interviews with 8 lawyers, two paralegals, 13 NGO representatives, three academics (including one PhD student), as well as 18 stateless persons. As well, in February 2018, I attended and observed a registration rally organised by an opposition political party that brought 40 stateless persons to a registration centre to help them submit applications for citizenship. This research was conducted in partnership with an NGO called Lawyers for Liberty in Malaysia, an organisation that has been involved in litigating cases for stateless persons and advocating for greater access to citizenship for stateless 38 39 40 Convention against Torture (n 15). ‘Suhakam Wants Malaysia to Ratify Six Human Rights Conventions, Says Waytha Moorthy’ The Star (Putrajaya, 21 August 2018) <https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/08/21/suhakam-wants-malaysia-to-ratifysix-human-rights-conventions/>. See Appendix Table 3, 5L. 102