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Malaysian punk rock kid currently stateless and in need of urgent help

By on December 23, 2017

This is heart-breaking information to be receiving especially when many are celebrating this holiday season as they do every day with close family and friends.

Please read through the post and if you are able to help kindly do so immediately:

“Wong Kueng Hui, aged 23, is one of our friends from Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. He plays with hardcore punk outfits Urge and Rant besides being a collective worker for The Terminus.

He has one of the biggest problems that anyone of us could ever imagine, HE IS STATELESS. Yes, you heard that right. He is chained to an invisible jail. Although he was born and raised here to a Malaysian father, he was denied citizenship, thus isn’t eligible for education, jobs or even healthcare.

The Federal Constitution allows for a child born in Malaysia, who is “not born as citizen of another country,” and who cannot acquire citizenship of another country by registration within one year of birth, to become a citizen of Malaysia by operation of law.

In his case, he could not be granted citizenship despite being born in Malaysia because he didn’t have his parents’ Marriage Certification. Thus immigration said that he should follow his birth mother’s nationality. The fact that his mother was not a Malaysian citizen, who died when he was 16 years old (and his father when he was 4 years old) and this has been almost impossible to track down, was irrelevant.

Currently he is in Kuala Lumpur (his first time outside Sabah) to follow-up with his status and was granted by Sabah’s Immigration visiting permit that will expire in one week’s time. Excluding Christmas, he only has 4 days to go.

Yesterday, I drove him to the Home Ministry to check the status on the application but disappointingly, they could not yet confirm. I called Sabah’s Immigration to ask if he could extend the deadline but apparently the officer said NO. Otherwise he will be detained in the airport whenever he returned home. When I called the JPM to ask further about this, the officer on line said that the application might get rejected simply because his mother was a foreigner even though he was born in Malaysia.

This guy, our friend is only 23 years old and the future looks uncertain for him.”

If you can help please contact Ci Chaan immediately: [email protected]

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