KUALA LUMPUR: For the last 11 years, Wong Kueng Hui , a stateless man, lived in fear of being arrested by the authorities, until the Kuala Lumpur High Court granted him a Malaysian citizenship yesterday.
Yesterday, Justice Datuk Nordin Hassan granted him citizenship and ordered the National Registration Department to issue an identity card. “Other stateless children have different circumstances – they were adopted and their adoptive parents wanted them to get citizenship. But in Wong’s case, it’s different, he is an adult and has to fight on his own.”
In December 2017, he applied for a one-month special permit from the Sabah Immigration Department to fly to Kuala Lumpur and is the only known stateless Sabahan to have successfully travelled to peninsular Malaysia to secure his citizenship.
It’s a constitutional problem which has been overlooked and nobody stands up to rectify the system since the country’s independence. Help these stateless community starts living their lives normally