e-Risalah USIM - Edisi Jun 2021

MEI 2021 15 | I n Conversation with Dr. Rodziana Mohamed Razali, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Syariah and Law, USIM and Research Affiliate, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University In 2018, a year after completing her PhD, Dr. Rodziana Mohamed Razali, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Syariah and Law, USIM, was honored as one of the two recipients of the prestigious Arnold & Blema Steinberg Post-Doctoral Fellowship in International Migration Law & Policy (2018/19) by McGill University, Canada. She shares her experience of being the Steinberg research fellow working on her research on childhood statelessness and her thoughts on the subject of statelessness and legal identity, her central area of research expertise. 1. Please describe your experience undertaking and completing your fellowship with the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill University from 2018 to 2019. How has this valuable opportunity impacted you personally and your career? Coming from the developing world, the Arnold and Blema Steinberg fellowship has made it possible for scholars like me to impact the internationalization of our higher education by tapping into and experiencing with cutting-edge resources and networking opportunities with intellectually robust academic as well as professional communities from North America and around the world. A year-stint spent at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in a multi-cultural legal and social landscape was a landmark phase in my career. It provided me with multiple platforms to highlight regional and country contexts on legal, social and development challenges associated with childhood statelessness, via a series of seminars, lectures, and dialogues organized by the Centre and other departments at McGill University. Working under the supervision and mentorship of a world class senior academic expert in migration law and policy, Professor François Crépeau (the Hans and Tamar Chair in Public International Law) and the inspiring leadership of the Centre’s Co Director, Professor Nandini Ramanujam has profoundly stimulated a new way to look at and approach things and diversely enriched my foresight and professional interests. With all the opportunities and network of support I was able to receive through this fellowship, my research project has culminated in a book manuscript addressing prevention of childhood statelessness, two published journal papers, and various seminar papers presented in Canada as well as Europe. Within less than a year of returning to my home country and institution, I was already working as a principal investigator of a researchprojectthatseekstoreviewaspects of migration law and policy governing low-skilled foreign workers under a grant sponsored by the Malaysian government and another research project funded by a United Nations agency on access to birth registration for children affected by migration. I am grateful to have been part of this prestigious fellowship and will certainly continue to treasure the personal and professional bonds established with the wonderful McGill community and other colleagues in Canada.  2. Can you tell us how did you get interested in the statelessness issue in Malaysia and choose the said topic for your PhD thesis? How did you expand on this topic in the research that your pursued under the fellowship? First and foremost, I knew I wanted to explore an area of research that would allow me to positively contribute to humanity where there are compelling gaps in the work of scholars. I also wanted to research a problem that affects my region and my own country. My conscience convinced me that that could position me better in terms of appreciating the contexts as well as the dynamics of the research issues, with the hope that my research and the possible solutions that it might generate are strongly grounded in such awareness and insights. It struck me to learn of how statelessness and non-belonging to any state could be linked to many intersecting phenomena such as refugee flows and other forms of migration, poverty, discrimination and state succession, among others. Figures that were quoted by the media suggested between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people affected by statelessness or at risk of statelessness in Malaysia. We are just behind Myanmar and Thailand in terms of the scale of the problem, which speaks to the breadth and intensity of the problem region-wide. Despite the magnitude of the problem, I found research and conversations about statelessness were somehow invisible in the local academic and non-academic scenes. Speaking of how the subject is treated in Malaysia, many tend to lump stateless with the wider category of undocumented and irregular migrants, which in turn adumbrates statelessness and feeds it into the common narratives around xenophobia and other anti-migrant sentiments. Some people whom I spoke with mistook stateless for refugees. Some politicians asserted that they do not exist in Malaysia, but at other times, made references to, for instance, stateless children being unable to enter the Malaysian school system. There seems to be much confusion over who these people are and how they come to be stateless or at risk of being stateless. Driven by the goal of prevention and reduction of statelessness, I discovered prevention of childhood statelessness to be the specific area I wanted to dig into, as children especially, never deserve to be born stateless and to endure the plight of living without basic needs to accessible and affordable healthcare, education, liberty, and security of person. Under the fellowship, I expanded the previous scope of research by looking at the solution dimension to statelessness through a construction of a framework of birth registration that is traditionally confined to host states as the duty bearers to include states of origin. Where structural barriers stemming from ethnic identity politics, lack of political will and discrimination are widespread, the project tapped into context-specific tools employed by non-state actors such as international organizations, civil societies and private entities in overcoming barriers to access birth registration and possession of proof of legal identity. It evaluates the standards of birth registration with a view to exploring areas to strengthen the nexus between birth registration and the acquisition and establishment of a legal identity, including nationality. InConversationwithDr.Rodziana MohamedRazali:Addressing StatelessnessinMalaysia Faces of USIM JUN