A three-member bench, comprising Chief Judge of Sabah and Sarawak Azizah Nawawi and Court of Appeal judges Nazlan Ghazali and Azhahari Kamal Ramli, dismissed without costs the appeals brought by the registrar and registrar-general of births and deaths, the national registration director-general, the home minister and the government.
Nazlan, who delivered the court’s unanimous decision online, said K Kamaladevi, her two children and her three grandchildren had successfully established their case for citizenship by operation of law under Article 14(1)(b), read with Section 1(a) of Part II of the second schedule of the Federal Constitution.
“Given the totality of the evidence, the respondents proved on a balance of probabilities that they had fulfilled the third requirement of Section 1(a) … that one of the parents is a Malaysian citizen,” Bernama reported him as saying.
Nazlan also said nothing in the Law Reform (Marriage and Divorce) Act 1976 makes an identity card a prerequisite for the registration of marriage or prohibits the marriage of stateless persons.
He also said the Court of Appeal found no appealable errors in the High Court’s judgment warranting appellate intervention.
In May last year, the High Court allowed the family’s lawsuit and declared that they were entitled to automatic Malaysian citizenship.
The court held that Kamaladevi and her daughter have the right to register their marriages under Malaysian law, and ruled that stateless persons in Malaysia have the right to register their marriage under Malaysian laws even without a Malaysian identity card.
Kamaladevi’s grandparents were both born in Malaya before the formation of Malaysia in 1963. The couple had two children – K Vathumalai and K Letchimee – through a customary marriage.
Letchimee encountered problems with her official documents after her stepfather pawned her birth certificate when she was a child. It was only recovered later by her brother.
She later entered into a customary marriage with a Malaysian man and had three children, including Kamaladevi. She could not register her marriage with the national registration department (JPN) as she did not possess an identity card then.
Kamaladevi claimed her mother should have received a Malaysian identity card but did not collect it from JPN before she died.
She said she was also unable to register her marriage to a Malaysian man as she did not have an identity card, resulting in her children born in Malaysia and her three grandchildren also becoming stateless.
At today’s proceedings, senior federal counsel Norazlinawati Arshad appeared for the appellants, while lawyers New Sin Yew and Shugan Raman appeared for the family members.