New Malaysian state law to punish women for wearing men’s clothing

Malaysia’s northeastern Terengganu state will punish gals for donning men’s garments and conceiving out-of-wedlock pregnancies. The state also outlawed ‘witchcraft and sorcery’. The go has drawn the ire of human legal rights activists in South-East Asia. The laws that ended up handed by the Terengganu state assembly previously this thirty day period make legislative provisions for punishments by a fine of up to 5,000 ringgit ($1,134), a 3-calendar year jail expression and six lashes, or any combination of the a few. 

As a lot of as 14 rights teams, which includes the All Women’s Motion Society, mentioned the legislative changes violate the appropriate to flexibility of expression, equality and non-discrimination.

Terengganu is ruled by Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, focused on Islamic fundamentalism. 

The new law in the Malaysian condition follows a comparable move by neighbouring Indonesia, which outlawed extramarital sexual intercourse and lifted the penalty for abortions. The invoice, which turned law last week, also adds limits to how a lot individuals can criticise Indonesia’s public institutions. 

Fundamentalism in Malaysia hitting country’s financial standing?

Even though Malaysia appeared to pick up financial momentum by investing diplomatic money and economical apparatus into landmark G20 summit previous thirty day period as very well as multiple investors’ summits this calendar year, so significantly world wide money have pulled up over $1.2 billion from the domestic bond market place in 2022 amid concerns related to fundamentalism driven by political instability in the Southeast Asian country, Bloomberg claimed.

New rules for ‘well-being’ of Muslims

The new regulations would much better defend “the effectively-remaining of Muslims,” state-operate Bernama information agency cited state religious formal Satiful Bahari Mamat as stating. He included that the prohibition on ladies behaving like guys was enacted simply because current legal guidelines only dealt with men acting like women.

“Because in the past, there may possibly not have been much of this issue (gals acting like gentlemen),” he explained to the state news agency. “But we see now that ‘pengkid’ (tomboy or lesbian) situations and the like are getting to be a lot more popular, so the state authorities intends to control this concern.”

Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or PAS as it is regarded, won the most seats of any solitary celebration in final month’s common election. It has been a proponent of reworking Malaysia into an Islamic state, and has pushed the parliament to let it to put into practice rigid Islamic rules in the states it controls.

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