Human Rights And Statelessness I N P E N I N S U L AR M AL AYS I A In this section, we will review the categories of stateless populations in this study to analyse the causation of their statelessness as well as the scale of the issue. 2.1 Pe r s o n s w i t h l o n g - s t a n d i n g r e s i d e n c e s i n c e pre-independence and their descendants 2.1.1 Causation of statelessness Persons who have been living in Peninsular Malaysia prior to independence (before 31 August 1957) become ‘administratively’ stateless because they did not register or apply for the appropriate documentation after Merdeka Day or Malaysia Day. Although statelessness in this group is most commonly attributed to Indian persons of Tamil descent living in rural plantations, it also includes other migrant populations such as persons of Chinese descent and persons of Siamese descent. Indian Tamils who used to live in rural plantations make up a large part of this stateless population because they lived remotely in self-contained communities where there was no need for formal documentation (Liew, 2019). Many did not register their children’s birth or their marriages as they were unaware of its importance. Once the plantations were closed and they moved to urban areas, they started facing difficulties obtaining access to public services despite having lived here for generations and having strong, effective links to Malaysia (DHRRA, 2017). Therefore, lack of formal documentation such as birth certificates, passports, identification cards, and entry permits, as well as lack of access to registration services to qualify for citizenship are the main barriers for this group to obtain citizenship despite their legal entitlement to the same. Many stateless permanent resident card holders die before they are able to obtain their citizenship, as in the case of Jaya Letchumi, who died in 2021 while waiting for a decision on her citizenship application that she started working on in 2018. Jaya Letchumi’s mother had also passed away as a permanent resident, highlighting the intergenerational aspect of this form of statelessness (Cikgu Rukku, 2021). D. Kamaladevi, whose family lived in the estates, has not been able to obtain citizenship for the past 45 years because her mother’s documents could not be located as they claimed it had been surrendered to JPN (“After 45 Years”, 2018). Another 30