This is the widest split on Fair Away. No other country we cover scores above 7 on democracy and below 2 here. Sex between men is a criminal offence under federal law — sections 377A and 377B of the Penal Code, carrying up to twenty years' imprisonment and caning — and, separately, under each state's syariah criminal enactments, which apply to Muslims and reach gender expression as well as sexual acts. Malaysia is not covered by the ILGA Rainbow Europe index (Europe only), so this score comes from the Equaldex Equality Index, where Malaysia sits at 18/100 (legal rights 8, public opinion 27) — hence the ~.

The direction of travel is the part worth knowing. Justice for Sisters recorded at least 307 arrests of LGBTIQ people between January and December 2025. New and amended state syariah provisions explicitly criminalising gender expression have hit trans women hardest, reversing ground won in a 2021 Federal Court ruling that struck down Selangor's section 28 as unconstitutional. Note the one number that runs the other way: public opinion (27) sits nineteen points ahead of the law (8) — one of the widest law-versus-opinion gaps in Asia. What has hardened here is the state, not the street.

Malaysia has the highest democracy score in South-East Asia — 7.11 in the EIU's 2024 index, 44th of 167, ahead of Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. That is a real distinction: power actually changed hands in 2018 and again in 2022, and the electoral process itself scores 9.58. But the score is falling for a second year (7.29 in 2023), and the weak component is civil liberties, at 5.88.

Press freedom is where that shows. Reporters Without Borders ranks Malaysia 95th of 180 in 2026 (score 52.73), down seven places from 88th, with the economic indicator collapsing from 60th to 92nd. The legal arsenal is old and still in use: the 1948 Sedition Act (up to twenty years), the 1972 Official Secrets Act, the Printing Presses and Publications Act licensing regime, and the Communications and Multimedia Act deployed against "fake news". In January 2026 RSF called for an end to a sedition investigation into journalist Rex Tan, arrested after asking a question at a public lecture. The lines that trigger prosecution are the "3R" subjects — race, religion and royalty — and self-censorship around them is widespread. Alongside that sits a genuinely vigorous independent online press, led by Malaysiakini.

Our two women's-rights sources disagree about Malaysia more than about almost any other country on this site, and the disagreement is the story. The Georgetown WPS Index 2025, which measures lived conditions, puts Malaysia at 0.738 (7.4/10, 67th). The World Bank's Women, Business and the Law 2026 legal-frameworks score puts it at 49.6 (5.0/10). That 2.4-point gap is the second-widest in our dataset, after the UAE. Malaysian women have high educational attainment and rising workforce participation; the legal scaffolding behind it is thinner than that suggests.

The structural reason is the same dual system that shapes the LGBTQ+ picture: family law runs on two tracks, civil law for non-Muslims and syariah for Muslims, with unequal provisions on divorce, guardianship and inheritance, and no single national floor for the age of marriage. On reproductive rights, abortion is lawful under section 312 of the Penal Code where a registered medical practitioner judges that continuing the pregnancy would risk the woman's life or injure her physical or mental health — broader than is often assumed, but doctor-gated rather than available on request, with access varying sharply by state, by cost and by which practitioner you reach.

The World Justice Project puts Malaysia at 0.57 in 2025 — 56th of 143 globally, 7th of 15 in East Asia and the Pacific. It is a genuinely mixed picture rather than a weak one: civil justice ranks 34th in the world and regulatory enforcement 51st, while open government ranks 105th and fundamental rights 83rd. Courts and contracts work; transparency and rights protection lag. WJP's 2025 edition also records declines in Malaysia on freedom of opinion and expression, on freedom of assembly and association, and on the integrity of checks and balances. Underneath sits the structural feature: federal civil courts alongside state syariah courts whose jurisdiction over Muslims has been widening.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data simply doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Malaysia is one of those cases. So instead of a figure that would look precise without being it, here is as honest a summary as we can give of what is actually known.

The number on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour. That review covers 131 countries that hold trade preferences with the United States — and Malaysia no longer does, so it isn't assessed at all. Any number we invented in its place wouldn't mean the same thing as Thailand's or Indonesia's, which would make comparing them meaningless.

What is on record sits on the same department's other list, of goods rather than governments. Malaysian palm oil is listed as produced with both child labour and forced labour; garments and electronics are listed for forced labour. On the plantations, the children involved are largely the children of migrant workers, many of them born in Sabah without papers — and the missing papers are also what keeps them out of school. So: a real and specific problem, no measurement of how hard the country is working on it, and an honest blank rather than a guess. The adult side of the same story is in the note below.