Home Ministry setting up special task force for citizenship applications

KUCHING: The Home Ministry is setting up a special task force to handle citizenship applications, including those from Sarawak, says Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

The Home Minister said the task force, which will be headed by the ministry's director-general and deputy secretary-general, would expedite and resolve all matters relating to such applications.

"With this task force, we expect to be able to resolve a large number of applications by the end of this year and the rest as soon as possible, " he told reporters after visiting the National Registration Department (NRD) counter at Urban Transformation Centre here on Monday (July 29).

As such, he said there was no longer a need to continue the Sarawak special committee on citizenship.

Last Saturday (July 27), state Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Datuk Fatimah Abdullah said she was disappointed that the Home Ministry had decided to discontinue the special committee.

Fatimah, who chaired the committee, said it enabled quicker action on applications from Sarawak as they were not placed together with applications from other states.

The special committee was set up in 2016 under the previous Barisan Nasional administration at Sarawak's request to facilitate and expedite citizenship applications from the state.

Muhyiddin also said citizenship registration, applications and processing came under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, not the state government.

"It is a federal matter. The state special committee was set up to assist in this.

"But now that we have the special task force, we think we don't need to burden the state government with this duty, " he said, adding that the state government had been informed about this.

He called for continued cooperation from the state government and elected representatives to bring up citizenship issues directly to the state NRD director or federal headquarters.

"This will help us to expedite the application process for applicants, " he said.

In his speech earlier, Muhyiddin said the ministry had drawn up new standard operating procedures (SOP) to ensure that citizenzhip applications would be considered more fairly and speedily.

He said guidelines under the new SOP would cut the processing time for each application from three years to one year at most.

In addition, decisions on applications under Article 15A will take into account the welfare of the children applying for citizenship, he said.

Article 15A covers citizenship applications for individuals below 21 years under special circumstances.