A Malaysian man has won a landmark court case against an Islamic ban on gay sex. In 2018, the man – whose identity has been withheld for his own protection – was arrested in the central Selangor state for attempting gay sex, although he still denies the claims.
He subsequently filed a lawsuit in which he argued that Selangor had no power to enforce the Islamic ban on “intercourse against the order of nature” as it was already a crime in the country’s civil law.
Malaysia’s constitution says a state cannot exact a law when the same law already exists at a national level. On Thursday (25 February), Malaysia’s top court unanimously ruled in his favour, with chief justice Tengku Maimum Tuan Mat declaring that the state’s power to implement such