KUCHING: Sarawak Citizens Task Force Committees will go down to the field to help the Penan community get their citizenship.
Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Minister Datuk Fatimah Abdullah, however, said it would not be an easy task to look for them as the community is nomadic in nature.
“The government is doing all it can to help this rural community get their citizenship status,” she said.
“For the Penan case, it needs to be looked into one by one and it can be solved under Section 15 (A) of the Sarawak Citizens’ Task Force Committees regulation for children under 18 and below as long as the parents are citizens,” she added.
She was asked by reporters about a report in a local English newspaper that 100 Penan children in Baram did not have citizenship documents.
Fatimah said the taskforce committees had until Aug 31 next year to solve the citizenship status in Sarawak.
She added that the citizenship issues were not new and the problem was due to the parents taking birth registration lightly.
“The problem arises when the children are going to school,” she pointed out.
She disclosed that up to June this year, the government had carried out 102 operations on the matter and 5,354 applications had been received, out of which 3,718 had been approved, 1,620 were rejected due to the status of the origin of the parents and 16 were still being looked into.
Earlier, she presented scrolls at the Rafflesia Academy graduation ceremony at Merdeka Palace & Suites here yesterday.