Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah’s order banned adultery and homosexual sex in the country, Al Jazeera reported. Since April 3rd, such activity becomes illegal and should be punished by death by stoning, according to the new law.
Brunei joins the countries where homosexual sex is prohibited, the state became the first in its region that adapted Islamic sharia law, one of the toughest codes of rules. Homosexuality has been illegal in Brunei since the country was a British colony, but the new law, in effect, makes it not just illegal, but punishable by death.
Brunei citizen have been informed on a new law that comes into effect next Wednesday. An official notice of the April 3 start date went up on the Attorney General’s website on December 29.
A strict set of new sharia laws was announced in 2014 by the country’s sultan who doubles as the prime minister.
According to the Brunei lawyers, the new law becomes the outcome of a pretty rigorous process of figuring out how to implement a 2014 shariah penal code. Brian Harding, deputy director and fellow of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, commented on the implementation of sharia laws: “The whole initiative is driven by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah who is seeking to make the country more culturally Islamic, at least in his vision,” he wrote in an email.
Brunei sharia law contradicts the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
While the government website quoted the sultan as saying, “His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam, in the [command], asserted that in carrying out the Laws of Allah, the nation does not expect other people to accept and agree with it, but that it would suffice if they just respect the nation in the same way that it also respects them,” the activists condemned such a norms.
“This new law violates the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It should be widely condemned,”
tweeted Richard Grenell, U.S. ambassador to Germany, who became the first openly gay spokesperson for a Republican presidential candidate in 2012.
