PUTRAJAYA: Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali will look into the Court of Appeal judgment on the court’s ruling that a Muslim child conceived out of wedlock could take the surname of his or her father, before deciding whether to proceed with the leave to appeal application.
Head of the Civil Division in the Attorney-General’s Chambers, Datuk Amarjeet Singh said Apandi need to get input from various parties before deciding whether to proceed with the leave to appeal application at the Federal Court.
He confirmed the leave to appeal application had already been filed on June 19, this year. The second highest court of the land had allowed the appeal on May 25 and the judgement was issued yesterday.
The Attorney-General’s chambers is appearing for the National Registration Department (NRD), the National Registration director-general and the government of Malaysia in the case.
Amarjeet Singh said the proposed legal questions concerned matters of public interest involving fatwa and provisions of written law that the appellate court judge relied on.
He also said case management on the matter has been fixed for Sept 18 and that they would notify the court on that day whether they are proceeding or not with the leave to appeal application.
The Court of Appeal in its judgment allowed the appeal brought by a couple who filed a judicial review to compel the director-generalof the NRD to replace their child’s surname ‘Abdullah’ with the name of the child’s father in the birth certificate.
In his judgment, Justice Datuk Abdul Rahman Sebli who was one of three judges presiding said the National Registration Department director-general was not bound by fatwa or religious edicts issued by the National Fatwa Committee to decide the surname of a Muslim child conceived out of wedlock.
He said the director-general’s jurisdiction was a civil one and was confined to determining whether the child’s parents had fulfilled the requirements under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1957 (BDRA), which covers all illegitimate children, Muslim and non-Muslim.
Abdul Rahman had held that a fatwa has no force of law and could not form the legal basis for the National Registration director-general to decide on the surname of an illegitimate child under section 13A (2) of the BDRA. — Bernama