Stateless Children In The Al-Jazeera's Documentary Review

The Al-Jazeera’s documentary film “Sabah’s Invisible Children” won a 2015 Human Right Press Award (Yeo, 2015). The documentary film discuss about the Sabah’s stateless children do not have the basic need and always escape from the authorities which made them living their life in fearful and anxious. These stateless children usually are the children or grandchildren from the refugees and migrants from Indonesia and Philippines (Ng. A, 2015). In some serious case, there are children who lost their lives during escape from the authorities. These stateless children do not have the right to access the facilities and benefits such as education and social service because they do not have citizenship and document. Due to the citizenship issue, this

“The plight of stateless children has not drawn the interest of many academics, human-rights activists, or policy makers” (Bhabha, 2011, p. 43). But this issue actually is very important because it engage on the societal well-being. The stateless children are lack of education, healthcare, protection and other basic needs. It is hard for them to access for needs such as education and healthcare because they lack of official identification document (Sadiq, 2008). This is not supposed to happen because the children needs and rights must be protected. According to Child Act (2001), child is a person who is below 18 years old and their welfare need to be protected. The National Policy for Children also emphasize on the basic needs for children such as education, healthcare and protection. In Malaysia, the stateless children in Sabah where their life were terrible. Adding on, they need to hide with their family from authorities and they do not live in safe environment where it contradict from the statement that “all children have a right to live in a safe environment” (Janson & Fraser, 2006, p. 24). Their well-being are neglected whereby they always in the situation of harassed or chased by the authorities. The action of the authorities can lead to neglect of children. According to Jeyes (2011), neglect is the failure of adults in giving the basic needs for children. Besides that, stateless children in Malaysia did not get the full education like the other children because their parents do not have enough money to cover up the fee for their children’s study. It is due to the stateless children need to register as the foreigner and the fee is much more expensive than usual. Thus, it is difficult for these children to have a better job without a better level of education in the future. In Thailand, they do not restrict