Human Rights And Statelessness
I N P E N I N S U L AR M AL AYS I A
would be concealed by changing the names, locations, and parties that
may be mentioned during the interview. For Zoom interviews, the video
function would not be utilised by the participants and the interview would
only be recorded aurally. All recordings of the interviews would be kept in
password protected folders on the researchers’ computers and destroyed
14 days after the interview is transcibed.
Protections surrounding mental health and physical distress
In the event that certain questions were distressing for the participants,
all interviewers were given basic psychological first aid training to pick
up signs of distress and to respond appropriately, either through active
listening and practices surrounding empathy, or through a referral list of
experts and professionals who could help aid the participants. Participants
who were deemed to need it were offered information on avenues to attend
counselling with mental health practitioners or social workers.
1.8 Literature review
In reviewing the literature on statelessness in Malaysia, we found that
there were more studies that focus on statelessness in Peninsular
Malaysia, compared to studies on statelessness in East Malaysia. We
found 20 studies that focus on statelessness in Peninsular Malaysia, as
compared to 13 studies on statelessness in East Malaysia, particularly
amongst the Bajau Laut community and Filipino stateless refugee
community in East Malaysia. We used the following phrases “stateless
Malaysia”, “statelessness Malaysia”, “right to citizenship Malaysia”,
“isu kewarganegaraan Malaysia”, and “orang tanpa kewarganegaraan
Malaysia” to search for these studies in English and Bahasa Malaysia
across Google Scholar, Research Gate, Research Rabbit, and other web
search engines on scholarly literature.
Table 4 illustrates the breakdown of the academic articles found, which
include a mix of peer-reviewed articles published in international journals
and non-peer-reviewed publications such as Malaysian university journal
articles, working papers, and students’ dissertations. For articles on
Peninsular Malaysia, 50% of the articles in English are published in
peer-reviewed international journals whereas 100% of the articles in
20