This means boy's mother bonking with current husband while still married to former husband?

[syed putra]

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Court orders surname change to reflect parentage​

Court orders surname change to reflect parentage​

2 hours ago

FMT Reporters
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Judicial Commissioner Moh Kok Wai says the national registration department has a duty to maintain a reliable public record.​

The Kuala Lumpur High Court ruled that JPN’s registrar-general of births and deaths has a statutory duty to rectify the boy’s information when supported by scientific evidence.
PETALING JAYA: The Kuala Lumpur High Court here has ordered the national registration department (JPN) to change the surname of an 11-year-old boy to accurately reflect his biological parentage.
Judicial Commissioner Moh Kok Wai granted the order to “align the formal legal record with scientific facts and the current familial reality”.

“This is not to pronounce him (boy) as an illegitimate child and to deprive him of (citizenship) rights.


“The plaintiffs (biological parents) seek to anchor his legal identity to biological facts within a secure and supportive family structure,” Moh said in his written grounds of judgment released on Wednesday.

The boy’s biological parents filed the lawsuit to compel JPN to change the boy’s surname on his birth certificate and MyKid.



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The child was born when his mother — a Chinese national — was married to another man and thus bore the man’s surname (“L”) at the material time.

The couple divorced in 2017 and the boy’s mother subsequently remarried the boy’s biological father, with the surname “K”, in 2020.

A DNA test confirmed the current husband as the boy’s father “with a high degree of probability”. The former husband filed an affidavit stating that he supported the suit.

Moh said JPN’s registrar-general of births and deaths had a statutory duty to rectify the boy’s information when supported by scientific evidence.


“The duty to maintain a reliable public record is a positive obligation that cannot be sidestepped by an overly rigid reliance on a presumption of legitimacy in a non-adversarial context.

“In the face of such clear and uncontroverted evidence, for the defendant to maintain a register he knows to be factually inaccurate would be, in my view, a plain abdication of his statutory duty under Section 28 of the Births and Deaths Registration Act,” Moh said.

The judge also said the court considered a holistic approach to protect the boy’s interests.

“It is manifestly in the child’s interest that his surname should reflect his familial root, thereby fostering a sense of belonging and avoiding the confusion or psychological distress that might arise from bearing a different name from his father and (younger) sister,” Moh said