Human Rights And Statelessness I N P E N I N S U L AR M AL AYS I A registration, marriage registration, death registration, a summary of all government-issued identity cards, procedures for obtaining passports, and other forms of documentation utilised by stateless individuals. Section 5 explores circumstances leading to statelessness. It first presents an overview, and then goes through eight stateless groups of interest (namely persons with long-standing residence since pre-independence and their descendants, abandoned children born in Malaysia, adopted children, cases where children were born out of wedlock or before a marriage was registered, children born outside of Malaysia to Malaysian mothers and non-Malaysian fathers, indigenous persons, stateless refugees, and any other undocumented persons who do not fit any of the previous categories) by way of exploring causations of statelessness specific to the group, as well as the scale of the issue. Section 6 explores the process of acquiring citizenship in Malaysia. It runs through the citizenship application process through Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara (JPN – the National Registration Department), issues surrounding the process of obtaining citizenship, and a discussion on the denial of human rights and the inability to access services while waiting for citizenship applications to be processed. Section 7 presents the effects of statelessness on members of the community. Section 7 gives an analysis on human rights and statelessness. It looks at various intersections of statelessness with human rights violations, such as statelessness as it intersects with the rights to food, housing, family life, and duty to the community; statelessness as it intersects with the rights to social security, life, physical and mental health, education, non-discrimination, fair trial, and liberty; and statelessness as it intersects with the rights of women against violence, freedom of expression, assembly, and to not be subjected to torture or degrading treatment. Section 8 looks at the country’s attempts to reduce and prevent statelessness. It presents government perceptions towards statelessness, data and statistics of stateless persons in Peninsular Malaysia, and developments in resolving statelessness. xii