ASEAN Beat | Society | Southeast Asia

Malaysia Orders UN Agency to Pause Registration of New Refugees

With the creation of a new refugee agency in January, the country has asserted its control over the processing of asylum-seekers.

Malaysia has asked the United Nations refugee ‌agency to temporarily stop registering new refugees in the country, as it begins running its own system for managing asylum-seekers, an official from the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.

Deputy Foreign Minister Lukanisman Awang Sauni told parliament that the decision was made by the Cabinet so that the government could begin implementing ​its own refugee registration program.

Known as Dokumen Pendaftaran Pelarian (DPP), the program came into force in January, and is intended to replace the current registration system managed by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“We have gone through the Cabinet’s decision and instructed the UNHCR to stop any refugee registrations for the time being because we are reorganizing the implementation of the DPP program,” Lukanisman said, the Malaysian state news agency Bernama reported.

“Through the DPP, the government can manage data in a more organized manner, including the purposes of data coordination, identity verification, monitoring, and regulation without relying on the records of any foreign entities,” he added.

The UNHCR says that there were around 215,600 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with the agency in Malaysia, as of the end of February. The majority of these – some 193,824 – were from Myanmar, including 126,144 Rohingyas, 15,774 Chins, and 33,002 members of other ethnic groups who have fled persecution and conflict.

The introduction of the DPP follows several years in which Malaysia has significantly tightened the enforcement of its immigration laws, ramping up raids and arrests of those it deems to have entered the country illegally. This campaign peaked last year, when Malaysian authorities arrested about 92,000 undocumented migrants, compared with 12,000 in 2021.

Around 21,000 people are currently being held in immigration detention centers, with no legal limit on the length of their detention. The government has denied UNHCR access to these centers since 2019.

This has been paralleled in recent months by a growing public hostility toward Rohingya refugees in particular. As Alex Howlett reported for The Diplomat last week, last month more than half a million people signed a petition on Change.org calling for the removal of Rohingya refugees from Malaysia, while prominent public figures have recently described the Rohingya as “criminals” and “intruders” and likened them to a “cancer” on the country.

Lukanisman told parliament that the purpose of DPP was to reduce the burden on Malaysia of managing such a large number of asylum-seekers, and to exercise much tighter control over those who are admitted. Refugee registrations under the DPP “will be carried out through........

© The Diplomat