Press Statement
Hannah Yeoh’s praise for Madani govt & Saifuddin’s handling of citizenship cases is hypocritical & dishonest & ignores thousands of stateless persons who are still suffering under Madani government
12 October 2025
We refer to the comment on 10th October 2025 by Youth and Sports Minister Hannah Yeoh in which she lauded the Madani Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution for being better than his predecessors in addressing the issues of citizenship and the stateless.
It is shocking and embarassing that Yeoh has come out to say this in the midst of an international scandal which highlights the unjust and preferential treatment the Home Ministry and the National Registration Department (“NRD”) has meted out in dealing with citizenship and stateless persons.
This tone-deaf statement by the Minister does nothing to assuage public discontent and anger against the government over the grant of citizenship to the seven football players with heritage claims, that were found by FIFA to be false. Netizens were right to dig up Yeoh’s statement in 2022 when she was still in opposition, where she criticised the then government over the preferential treatment of granting citizenship to football players over stateless individuals. This is exactly what is happening under the current Madani government of which Yeoh is a part of right now. The double standards and hypocrisy is clear for all to see.
Failure to address this clearly, and opting instead to sing praises to Madani and Saifuddin Nasution for shows how Hannah and her cabinet colleagues have put aside principles for political expediency. In other words, it is blatantly clear that they used groups like the stateless as props for political mileage when in opposition for political gain. Now in government, Hannah Yeoh brazenly sings a different tune.
To make things worse, Hannah has the audacity to laud the citizenship amendments for “empowering Malaysian mothers”. In fact, that amendment was a fraud upon Malaysian mothers who were denied citizenship for their children on grounds they were born abroad. This is because the amendments deliberately left out children born prior to the passing of the amendments. The amendment was useless to the mothers with the existing children who had campaigned so hard for a change in the law. It is shameful and dishonest for Yeoh to laud those amendments.
It is simply outrageous for Yeoh to claim that Saifuddin had treated citizenship matters with “compassion and efficiency”. It is public record that the Home Ministry under Saifuddin attempted to pass the most regressive amendments to the Constitution that would have made worse the problem of statelessness in Malaysia. He tried to remove Section 1(e), Part II, Second Schedule of the Federal Constitution which was the clause that enabled stateless Malaysians to get citizenship as of right. The amendments were only abandoned after fierce opposition by civil society and the public. Hannah Yeoh simply pretends none of this ever happened, in her zeal to defend Madani government and Saifuddin.
Hannah also praised Saifuddin for purportedly clearing 49,000 in backlog citizenship applications. However, she stopped short of saying how many qualified stateless persons still remain without citizenship. The number of backlog applications cleared does not reflect the large numbers of desperate people out there who remain stateless, including thousands of school-going children.
Why has the SOP for NRD not been amended or made consistent with the Constitution and the landmark judgments of former CJ Tengku Maimun on citizenship? As a result, new cases of statelessness are being created even as Yeoh claims the backlog is being cleared. It is important to remember that many of those who became stateless did so due to the failure of the NRD and the Home Ministry to recognise their Malaysian citizenship under the constitution. In other words, citing the number of cleared backlogs is meaningless.
The only “compassion” and “efficiency”, as claimed by Hannah, that the public can see by Saifuddin Nasution seems to be reserved for the 7 football players. The NRD issued birth certificates even though they could not find the original records of their grandparents birth. The Home Minister bent over backwards to the point where he waved away the mandatory residence period required under the Federal Constitution, an act that is unlawful and unconstitutional.
The fact is that stateless children are still being deprived of their rights of education, healthcare and any hope of a better future. The preferential and unjust treatment that Hannah highlighted in her old social media post is still happening, and as a member of this government, it is her responsibility to resolve it, and not defend the indefensible in a knee-jerk manner.
Issued by,
Zaid Malek
Director
Lawyers For Liberty