After a documentary by Al Jazeera laid bare the state of refugees and immigrants in detention facilities in Malaysia, DAP has moved an emergency motion in parliament on the human rights violations exposed on film.

Referring to the documentary by Al Jazeera titled “Malaysia’s unwanted”, Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng and Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming asked that parliament discuss the heinous treatment of refugees.

The video captured the horrific state of refugees in Malaysia, where migrants are forced to life in detention facilities in lockups while being cuffed and chained to each other.

The DAP MPs asked that the motion be discussed in Parliament as the human rights issue laid bare by the video has not triggered a response from the government.

Lim also asked that Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar explain why children were kept in the facilities which is opposed to the United Nations Convention on Child rights (UNCC) signed by Malaysia. The convention states explicitly that the detention of children should not be allowed.

Al Jazeera reporter Steve Chao is seen in the video interviewing Wan Junaidi, who acknowledged that incidences of children kept under detention but said that babies and children are better off kept with their parents rather than without.

Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming said that this was akin to admitting that the government endorsed practices seen as illegal by the UNCC.

The video showed a child of less than two years old with an Afghani father in the facility. When spoken to, the father said that has been there for a year and that he only gets to meet his son once a month.

“Now he doesn’t even know that he is my son,” he said.

At the joint press conference with Ong Kian Ming, Lim also highlighted other human rights violations in the video, where migrants, mostly male, had accused the detention facilities of abuse. One of those questioned also could not hold back his emotions while sharing how he was beaten by authorities in the facility.

“The hardest thing I had to face in jail was being forced to take my clothes off and then being beaten, slapped and kicked in front of others all for no reason.”

“I have a family, a wife, and children. I am a respectable man. But in jail, there is no respect,” said Tial Ling from Myanmar before breaking down into tears.

Tial Ling, like many others like him locked up, are refugees from different countries mostly from South East Asia. However, the Malaysian government does not differentiate refugees from illegal immigrants.

When asked in the video if there were occurrences of abuse in the facilities, Wan Junaidi said “Certainly there must be something like this happening everywhere. So we cannot also avoid 100 percent”.

Wan Junaidi assured however “that on the basis of ‘generally’ we are doing very well”.

The Al Jazeera crew posed as a religious group to send supplies to the detention center captured on film almost a hundred people per lock-up kept in chains, squatting on the floor while forced to be barefoot. Detainees shared that food and water was scarce, and that some had to drink water from the toilets there.

The DAP MP’s also asked that the allegations of fraud and corruption be investigated, which, as seen in the video, saw a man claiming to be a middleman for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) charging a couple RM 3,500 for refugee identification cards.

The man said that the people from the UNHCR he was working with were locals and not foreigners.

In the statement, DAP called for the establishment of a committee in the Dewan Rakyat to investigate the allegations against the facilities and demanded that the Ministry of Home Affairs respond to the accusations that the DAP said would smear Malaysia’s “good name”. -The Rocket