KOTA KINABALU: 16 June 2026 – Advocates for Non Discrimination and Access to Knowledge (ANAK) has called on the Malaysian government to urgently reform birth registration procedures and withdraw all its reservations to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), amid a worsening crisis of undocumented and stateless children in Sabah.
ANAK Executive Director Anne Baltazar said that seven out of the ten poorest districts for children in Malaysia are located in Sabah, adding that the state imposes a 42-day registration window for births, compared to 60 days in Peninsular Malaysia.
Speaking as a panellist at the Parliamentary Symposium on Legal Reform for Children’s Rights, held at the Malaysian Parliament on 8 and 9 June, she stressed that birth registration is a fundamental human right that cannot be compromised – and emphasised that it does not automatically confer citizenship.
According to the Sabah Child Wellbeing Index, only 6.1% of children in the state meet the basic threshold for living in a safe environment. Among undocumented children, that figure drops to just 0.6% for those meeting basic health standards.
Ms Baltazar also pointed to the polio outbreak in Sabah before the Covid-19 pandemic as a direct consequence of the high number of undocumented children who had not received immunisations. She warned that failure to protect marginalised children would place entire communities at risk.
The two-day symposium, themed “The Child Act 2001 and the CRC: Good Practices,” was jointly organised by the Malaysian Parliament, SUHAKAM (the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia), and the All-Party Parliamentary Group Malaysia on Children’s Rights (APPGM-CR), in collaboration with the Sime Darby Foundation and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
ANAK is also pressing for amendments to the Child Act 2001 to protect all children regardless of their documentation status, an end to the detention of children in immigration depots, and the expansion of mobile birth registration outreach programmes in remote areas of Sabah.
