Children born from illicit affairs and unrecognised marriages make up a large number of the country’s stateless youngsters, says Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.

Cases of stateless children are due to Malaysian men having affairs or not registering marriages with foreigners, including Chinese nationals, Zahid said.

“Some men marry foreigners without informing their legitimate spouse,” he said in an interview with The Star .

“And they do not register the birth of the children as they probably feel guilty over the affair.”

Some Muslim marriages, Zahid added, took place abroad and were not recognised by the government nor certified by the state religious authorities.

Undetermined citizenship another cause

Other reasons of stateless children were also due to the undetermined citizenship status of the mother, incomplete documentation of the parents and abandoned children.

Based on the Home Ministry’s statistics, the citizenship of 14,095 children were yet to be determined between 2003 and April this year.

Most of the 14,095 children, or 87.7 percent of them, were in Sabah (8,128) and Sarawak (4,236).

Zahid said while the ministry had set up mobile units in the interior areas of East Malaysia to register children, it was also awaiting the findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) on illegal immigrants in Sabah to be finalised before taking further action.

A documentary on stateless children, released in February by non-governmental organisation Voice of the Children (VoC), claims that there are about 100,000 undocumented children in Malaysia.

Meanwhile, a recent report by Al Jazeera said some of these stateless people are ethnic Indians who have been struggling,  since the late 1950s, to prove that they are Malaysians.