Filipino refugees in Sabah through Malaysian civil law and Islamic law. They argue that the existing protections and rights did not meet the standard of international legal Islamic philosophy and that more can be done within Islamic law to provide these international Muslim refugees more protection. The only paper that takes a human rights approach is by Fahisham Taib (2012) who uses both stateless groups of children as a case study to explain the reasons they exist and the vulnerabilities they are exposed to when excluded from their basic rights. Olson (2007) describes recommendations for governments and UN agencies to resolve the large numbers of undocumented migrant children from the Philippines and Indonesia who, because of their statelessness, are targeted for arrest and deportation. 1.9 Background of researchers The main research team for this consultation project consisted of Dr. Melati Nungsari and Nicole Fong. Dr. Melati is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and a Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. She is an applied economist who works closely on issues surrounding labour market informality and social integration amongst vulnerable groups in Malaysia. Nicole is a Research Associate at Asia School of Business and a human rights defender. She is a social science researcher working on issues around human rights and public health amongst marginalised populations through an intersectional and feminist lens. The research team has a vast amount of experience interfacing with and collecting data in the field for research studies with marginalised populations. The team took two courses on statelessness – the Institute of Statelessness and Inclusion’s Advanced Course on Childhood Statelessness and the University of Melbourne’s Statelessness Intensive Course – in order to better understand these issues from an international law perspective, and have consulted with a legal scholar on matters relating to local laws and the Federal Constitution. 27