JPN bound by legitimacy order in marriage case

 Judge says national registration department’s records ‘must yield to the court’s judgment’.

The Melaka High Court has ordered the national registration department to process a woman’s marriage registration based on a 2011 court order declaring her a legitimate child. (Bernama pic)

PETALING JAYA:

The national registration department (JPN) cannot question a woman’s legitimacy or refuse to register her marriage based on its own records, having consented to a court order declaring her a legitimate child, the High Court in Melaka has ruled.

Judicial commissioner K Raja Segaran found that JPN was a party to the 2011 proceedings in which the Shah Alam High Court declared the woman a legitimate child.

He said the department could not 15 years later go behind that order simply because its database did not contain the words “anak sah taraf” (legitimate child).

“Where the two diverge, it is the record that must yield to the judgment, not the judgment to the record,” Raja Segaran said.

The woman, born in 2001, had gone to JPN to register her marriage under the Law Reform (Marriage and Divorce) Act 1976 (LRA).

The department rejected her application, citing doubts over her legitimacy and noting that her father had later been recorded in its database as a Muslim.

She then sought declarations from the High Court that she was the legitimate child of her parents in accordance with the 2011 order and that JPN should recognise her status when processing her marriage application.

Raja Segaran ruled that the High Court had jurisdiction to hear the case, saying it concerned the legitimacy of a child of a civil marriage and the statutory functions of a federal authority.

He said the matter did not fall within the jurisdiction of the shariah courts.

The judge also rejected JPN’s reliance on the father’s recorded religion.

He said LRA’s restriction on Muslim marriages applied to the parties seeking to marry, adding there was no evidence that the woman herself had ever affirmatively professed Islam.

The woman’s birth certificate recorded both parents as Hindus, while her identity card did not state she was a Muslim.

Raja Segaran stressed that he was not determining the father’s religious status or making a separate declaration on the woman’s religion.

Instead, he said the ruling was confined to whether JPN had lawful grounds to refuse to process her marriage application.

He ordered the department to receive, process and determine her application, or any fresh application made, within 30 days of being served with the court order.

JPN was specifically barred from refusing or delaying the application based on her legitimacy, the annulment of her parents’ marriage or her father’s recorded religion.

There was no order as to costs.

In a postscript, Raja Segaran said the case should never have reached the courts.

“A citizen should not have to litigate twice to establish a status that the state has once agreed to and recorded,” he said.

“An order of court does not lose its force because a database has no field in which to record it.” - FMT