DHRRA’s intervention exposed the circumstances and plights of thousands of stateless individuals who had remained hidden within the layers of the Malaysian society up to then. Given the gravity of the statelessness issues facing the rural Indian-Tamil community and the challenges faced in assessing the scale of the issue given the absence of accurate baseline data on statelessness in Malaysia, DHRRA initiated a registration and paralegal aid services in 4 states (Selangor, Perak, Kedah, Negeri Sembilan) in West Malaysia in June 2014 with the technical support provided by UNHCR. The mapping exercise, which successfully identified 12350 stateless people, was a ground-breaking effort in overcoming the hurdle of quantifying statelessness in Malaysia. Though the initiative ended in 2015, DHRRA continues to assist stateless persons from diverse ethnicities in Malaysia to acquire nationality documentation through its community based paralegal aid services. This exposed the organisation to the modus operandi of the varied government agencies involved in the process particularly the National Registration Department (NRD) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA). Over the years, DHRRA has supported and assisted thousands of individuals to free from the cycle of statelessness entrapping them and their families. Due to DHRRA’s continuous advocacy efforts on the issue, statelessness is no longer a concealed issue in Malaysia. It has gained attention of various stakeholders, especially the Malaysian Government, which prompted them to take the necessary actions to tackle the issue. This report, provides a grassroots perspective on the issues of statelessness in Malaysia. It encapsulates DHRRA’s experiences and the challenges faced in bringing changes to the lives of the stateless persons in Malaysia by utilizing the participatory approach and involving the stateless community at all the stages of the interventions. 1.1 Defining Stateless Person Despite hosting one of the largest numbers of stateless people in the ASEAN region, the Malaysian laws do not recognize stateless people as a specific category of people who exist in the country. In April 2015, when probed on the number of stateless children in Sabah and the actions taken by the Government to overcome this problem during a Dewan Negara session, the then Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi denied the existence of stateless people in Malaysia by stating, “Based on the definition of ‘stateless’ (which) refers to a person who has no nationality or citizenship in any country in the world, there (are) no stateless people in Malaysia because they are not allowed to enter this country without legal travel documents.”3 In the absence of an accepted definition under the Malaysian laws, this report adopts the internationally recognized definition of stateless persons as contained in Article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons i.e. “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”. In addition, the report also makes reference to persons who are at risk of statelessness. These are individuals who are not stateless but may become stateless if certain factor exists, which include the following categories of people:  Undocumented Persons These are individuals who either do not register their birth or their identification information is not recorded by the state registration departments. Though being undocumented alone does not render these individuals stateless, the lack of identity 3 Daily Express (2015) April 20th . No stateless people, says Zahid. http://www.dailyexpress.com.my/news.cfm?NewsID=99073 [Accessed 18 Nov. 2019]. [online] Available at: DHRRA Malaysia Page 4 of 29