The lower house in Malaysia, on Monday, approved legal reforms to abolish the mandatory death penalty for some offences.
The amendments which include murder and drug trafficking while 11 of them carry it as a mandatory punishment would be applicable to 34 offences currently punishable by death.
Malaysia has had a moratorium on executions since 2018, but courts have continued to send inmates to death row.
However, alternatives to the existing death penalty include whipping and imprisonment of 30 to 40 years, Aljazeera reports.
The lawmakers also agreed that capital punishment would be removed as an option for some serious crimes that do not cause death, such as kidnapping and the discharging and trafficking of firearms.
According to the Deputy Law Minister, Ramkarpal Singh. capital punishment was an irreversible punishment that had not been an effective deterrent for crime.
He said, “We cannot arbitrarily ignore the existence of the inherent right to life of every individual. The death penalty has not brought the results it was intended to bring.”
Since its independence in 1957, Malaysia is now part of countries that have abolished death penalty from their book.