Gender

The LGBT+ Community is one of the most discriminated within the minority category as the lives within the community have become politicised. Equal rights, protections and assistance to living are being debated compared to all the other categories - even though the LGBT+ community has been a part of various cultures around the world for hundreds of years including within Malay culture.

Malaysian women in binational marriages do not have equal rights to confer citizenship on their overseas-born children by operation of law as Malaysian men in binational marriages. Article 14(1)(b) of the Federal Constitution allows a person born outside of Malaysia to be a citizen by ‘operation of law’ provided that their father is a citizen at the time, limiting Malaysian mothers to Article 15(2) and its related Second Schedule, where citizenship is upon application. The application process via Article 15(2) is fraught with delays—ranging between two and ten years merely to receive a response, repeated rejections without reasons and no guarantee of approval

Women in this regard face a myriad of challenges, including inconsistent bureaucratic challenges during the citizenship application process, vulnerability to gender-based violence and compromised autonomy in the public, private and civic sphere. Non-citizen children of these women face unequal access to fundamental rights while living in Malaysia.