Federal Court to hear sisters’ appeal to be recognised as Hindus

 A three-member bench approved four legal questions before granting leave.

Federal Court judge Nordin Hassan said the applicants’ four legal questions met the threshold under Section 96 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964.

PUTRAJAYA:

 Two sisters will have the opportunity to appear before the Federal Court to restore a High Court declaration recognising them as Hindus.

This follows a decision by a three-member apex court bench to allow their leave application to appeal the Court of Appeal ruling last year that declared they were Muslims and must go to the shariah court to formally renounce Islam.

Bench chairman Justice Nordin Hassan said the applicants’ four legal questions met the threshold under Section 96 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964. Justices Lee Swee Seng and Collin Lawrence Sequerah also heard the application.

Leave to appeal is granted only if the case raises novel constitutional or legal questions of public importance for the first time.

The first question is whether a Selangor state law, the Administration of the Religion of Islam (Selangor) Enactment 2003, applies to determine the religion of an illegitimate child born to parents when one of them is Muslim.

They also asked whether the term “parents” in the enactment refers only to parents in a lawful marriage, based on a holistic interpretation of the law. They cited a Federal Court decision in 2021, which held that a woman born out of wedlock was free to practise Buddhism.

The third question is whether any federal or state law can legally declare a person a Muslim solely on the basis of ancestral lineage.

The fourth question is whether the definition of a Muslim under Section 2 of the Selangor enactment is inconsistent with Article 4(1) of the Federal Constitution, read together with Item 1 of the State List and Article 11, all of which render it unconstitutional.

Lawyers Gurdial Singh Nijar, Abraham Au, Fahri Azzat, and Iqbal Harith Liang represented the applicants, while Kamaruzaman Arif and Sofiah Omar opposed the leave application on behalf of the Selangor religious council. Senior federal counsel Ahmad Hanir Hambaly represented the national registration department (JPN).

Last year, the Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that the college-going sisters, aged 22 and 23, should follow the Islamic faith of their mother as they were born out of wedlock.

The Court of Appeal, allowing the appeal by the council and the department, stated that the civil court had no jurisdiction to determine the sisters’ religious status, as they had a Muslim maternal grandmother.

In 2024, the Shah Alam High Court had declared the sisters as Hindus and ordered the department to issue identity cards reflecting their actual religious status.

Their birth certificates listed their faith as Hinduism, following their father’s religion, and the sisters claimed to have been raised as Hindus.

However, the department insisted on issuing MyKads listing them as Muslims, arguing they were Muslims by operation of law despite never knowing or meeting their Muslim maternal grandmother.

The Selangor religious council argued that civil courts lacked jurisdiction and that renunciation of Islam could only be decided in the shariah court.

The sisters’ mother, anonymised as AG, was born out of wedlock to Safiah Othman, a Muslim woman and the sisters’ grandmother, and a Hindu man.

AG later married TK in a Hindu ceremony, but the marriage was not registered. - FMT