Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2017/9 statements about stateless persons in Malaysia.9 Despite this and the country’s reservation to the right to a nationality under Article 7(1) of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its non-ratification of the 1966 International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—which houses the similar right under Article 24(2)—the official treatment of the issue has reached a new milestone early this year. In April 2017, the Government launched the Malaysian Indian Blueprint, in which statelessness was officially acknowledged to be on the country’s national policy agenda targeting the affected Indian population of Tamil descent in West Malaysia.10 In light of the will to improve the socio-economic status of this group—through educational fulfilment and social inclusion of the community in the country—the Blueprint manifests the Government’s high priority on resolving statelessness and documentation issues faced by this population within a five-year timeframe. 11 This significant development was brought about by outreach programs which facilitated registration and citizenship application—organised by a Special Implementation Taskforce.12 The Blueprint in turn prompted a major registration campaign beginning in June 2017, known as Mega MyDaftar. The campaign resulted in more than 2,000 applications submitted for registration by persons of Indian descent wishing to resolve their lack of documentary proof of citizenship and legal status.13 For many years, data on stateless persons captured by UNHCR’s statistics have largely concentrated on the situation/populations in West Malaysia. While populations of stateless Indians of Tamil descent in several of the states in West Malaysia have been mapped and registered—and are hence in a favourable position to profit from the said policy roadmap for better inclusivity—baseline figures and demographic profiles of people ‘at risk’ of statelessness in the East Malaysian state of Sabah continue to be unavailable to date.14 On this note, Sabah is home to tens of thousands of persons without a legal identity including an established nationality draws a contrasting demographic picture. As of 2010, the state hosted 27.7% (889,779) non-citizens compared to 72.3% (2,316,963) Malaysians.15 Sabah represents an intergenerational case of stateless persons and persons of undetermined nationality, due to widespread lack of access to birth registration and other forms of valid identity proof, among other issues.16 Irregularity and lack of documentation reinforce the challenges in understanding and defining statelessness. Furthermore, lack of recognition and identification of statelessness in the face 9 See for instance Azhar Ramly, ‘All stateless children in Kedah now allowed to enroll in govt school’, New Straits Times (4 January 2017) <https://www.nst.com.my/news/2017/01/201897/all-stateless-children-kedah-nowallowed-enrol-govt-schools> accessed 5 September 2017 10 See Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Malaysian Indian Blueprint Blueprint’, <http://mib.my> accessed 5 September 2017 11 Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Malaysian Indian Blueprint ’, <http://mib.my>accessed 5 September 2017, pp 25 and 116 12 Ibid. p 119 13 N.A., ‘Claim of 300,000 stateless Indians baseless, says MIC’ (Putrajaya, 23 June 2017) http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2017/06/23/claim-of-300000-stateless-indians-baseless-says-mic/ accessed 8 September 2017 14 UNHCR, ‘Ending Statelessness in Malaysia’, http://www.unhcr.org/en-my/ending-statelessness-inmalaysia.html accessed 10 November 2017; Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless CHILDREN, Wolf Legal Publishers 2017, p 65 15 Population and Housing Census of Malaysia (2010); Economic Planning Unit, Malaysia (2011) 16 TENAGANITA, Acting Today for Tomorrow’s Generation, Regional Conference on Stateless/ Undocumented Children in Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, 2005; Catherine Allerton, ‘Contested statelessness in Sabah, Malaysia: Irregularity and the Politics of Recognition’ (2017) 15(3) Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 250-268; Rodziana Mohamed Razali, ‘Breaking the Cycle of Childhood Statelessness in Malaysia’, First Global Forum on Statelessness, The Hague, the Netherlands, 15-17 September 2014; Rodziana Mohamed Razali, ‘Research on ‘At Risk Populations’ Focusing on Protection against Statelessness at Birth for Children in a Mixed Migratory Context in Sabah, Malaysia’, Workshop for Academics: Researching and Teaching Nationality & Statelessness, 27 & 28 September 2016, Park Royal, Kuala Lumpur 6