In Malaysia, basic human rights education is not part of the national education curriculum. Only bits and pieces of human rights education are being taught in schools through moral and religious studies. Concerned over the lack of publications available in a user-friendly and simplified language to address this issue, gave us the inspiration to publish this citizens handbook. We were very fortunate that the Open Society Institute (OSI) based in New York was interested in this project and agreed to grant us a fund to initiate this project. Through this grant, we managed to engage prominent experts to come forward to help us in creating the modules.

It was a painstaking task in summarizing the entire law into simplified modules but We manage to pull through and this publication is the manifestation of it. These modules were then pilot-tested several times at the community centres targeting different levels of community to gauge its effectiveness before we published it.