KUALA LUMPUR: When Mrs Esther Teo, 37, was heavily pregnant with her second child in Germany back in 2019, she decided to return home to Malaysia not long before she was due to give birth.


The reason: Mrs Teo, who is married to a German national, wanted her child to be granted automatic Malaysian citizenship - something that her elder daughter was not able to get as she was born in Germany.

While Malaysian fathers can confer automatic citizenship on their children born overseas, Malaysian mothers who have a foreign husband are not able to do so.


So, Mrs Teo hid her pregnancy from airport officials and took the risk of taking a long-haul flight back to Malaysia despite not getting clearance from her gynaecologist to travel.


“I did not get clearance from my doctor to travel so I opened my wardrobe and wore the biggest clothes I could find so that I could hide my pregnancy to get into the plane,” said Mrs Teo, who went to Germany in 2006 for her studies, before she started working and eventually got married there.


She, however, considers Malaysia to be home and has always wanted to come back.


“My home and family are all in Malaysia. This is where my roots are. I couldn’t afford to be there if my two daughters are without Malaysian citizenship,” she told CNA.

Mrs Teo, who quit her engineering job, said that she endured a difficult and stressful time in her marriage when she decided to leave Germany.


There is seemingly light at the end of the tunnel for Mrs Teo and her eldest daughter for the girl to obtain Malaysian citizenship.


Among other things, citizenship determines access to education, healthcare, and employment.


Under Malaysia’s Constitution, acquisition of citizenship can be obtained by way of verification of citizenship status by “operation of law”, by registration and by naturalisation.


Following a legal battle launched by mothers in Malaysia that is now in the Federal Court, the government has proposed several amendments to the Constitution that will grant Malaysian mothers equal rights to confer automatic citizenship on their overseas-born children, just like Malaysian fathers.

The Federal Court is the highest court of the land and is the final avenue for the case to be heard.


But at the same time, the government has also proposed five other amendments to Malaysia’s citizenship law that rights groups claim threaten to worsen statelessness in the country.

They support two amendments that are in favour of the Malaysian mothers but said that five of the other proposed amendments are “regressive”.


MORE In trying to solve inequality faced by Malaysian mothers with overseas-born children, proposed changes to Constitution may worsen statelessness - CNA