Penal Code (Act 574): Malaysia's Principal Criminal Statute

Almost every article you will read about Act 574 opens with the same sentence: the Penal Code has 511 sections in 23 chapters. Both halves of that sentence are wrong.

This page is the statute record for Act 574 — its identity, its structure, its lineage and its place among Malaysia’s other criminal statutes. It does not set out the elements of any offence.

At a glance

Short title	Penal Code (section 1)
Act number	Act 574
Long title	”An Act relating to criminal offences”
First enacted	1936, as F.M.S. Cap. 45
Revised	1997, as Act 574, with effect from 7 August 1997
Application	Throughout Malaysia from 31 March 1976, by Act A327; P.U. (B) 139/1976
Numbering	Sections 1 to 511
Chapters	26 headings: I to XXIII, plus VA, VIA and VIB
Latest reprint	As at 4 July 2023

Where it came from

The Code is not a Malaysian original. Its ancestor is the Indian Penal Code, drafted by the first Indian Law Commission under Lord Macaulay, whose introductory report to the Governor-General of India in Council is dated 14 October 1837.

That code was carried into the Straits Settlements not by extension but by local re-enactment: the Straits Settlements Penal Code, Ordinance No. 4 of 1871, which came into operation the following year. The Federated Malay States adopted the same model in 1936 as F.M.S. Cap. 45, and that 1936 enactment is the statute the AGC’s own record still names as the first enactment of Act 574.

Three consequences follow, and they explain a great deal about how the Code reads. It uses illustrations — worked examples printed inside the section text — which is a Macaulay device. It defines its terms exhaustively in Chapter II before it defines a single offence. And it shares a common ancestry with the criminal codes of Singapore, Brunei, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, which is why cases from those jurisdictions are argued here at all.

The 26 chapters

Chapters I to V and Chapter XXIII carry the general part — the machinery that applies to every offence in the Code. Chapters VI to XXII carry the offence definitions.

Chapters	What they carry
I–II	Preliminary; general explanations and definitions
III	Punishments — now almost entirely repealed
IV	General exceptions, including the right of private defence
V, VA	Abetment; criminal conspiracy
VI, VIA, VIB	Offences against the State; terrorism; organised crime
VII–VIII	Armed forces; public tranquillity, unlawful assembly and rioting
IX–XI	Offences by and against public servants; contempts of lawful authority; false evidence and offences against public justice
XII–XIII	Coin and Government stamps; weights and measures
XIV–XV	Public health, safety, convenience, decency and morals; religion
XVI	Offences affecting the human body, from section 299 (culpable homicide)
XVII	Offences against property, from section 378 (theft)
XVIII–XX	Documents, currency and bank notes; criminal breach of contracts of service; marriage
XXI–XXII	Defamation; criminal intimidation, insult and annoyance
XXIII	Attempts, a single section

Chapters VA, VIA and VIB are the tell. They carry letters rather than numbers because they were inserted into an existing structure — criminal conspiracy, then terrorism, then organised crime. Counting the roman numerals alone gives 23 and misses them.

Why the section count is not 511

Section 511 is the last section, not the 511th. Between section 1 and section 511 the Code contains:

• Express gaps. The reprint states outright that there are no sections 14 to 16, no section 18, no sections 41 to 42 and no sections 244 to 245.
• Repealed runs. Chapter III, headed “Punishments”, has lost sections 53 to 55, 59 to 60, 63 to 64, 66 to 70 and 73 to 74. Only sections 57, 71, 72, 75 and 75A survive it.
• Lettered insertions. Sections 121A to 121D, 124B to 124N, 130A to 130ZC and 377A to 377E are all additional sections that the numbering 1–511 does not count.

The net effect is a Code whose general part has been hollowed out and whose offence part has been repeatedly extended.

How it relates to Malaysia’s other criminal statutes

Section 2 says every person is liable to punishment under this Code and not otherwise for acts contrary to it. Read alone that sounds exclusive. Section 5 immediately corrects the impression: nothing in the Code is intended to repeal, vary, suspend or affect any other written law in force.

Section 40 completes the picture. “Offence” ordinarily means a thing made punishable by the Code — but in Chapter IV and in a listed set of sections it extends to anything punishable under any other law in force. The Code is the general criminal statute, deliberately built to sit under specialised ones.

Its closest partner is the Criminal Procedure Code (Act 593), which supplies the procedure the Code does not: arrest, charge, trial, bail and sentence. The First Schedule to the CPC tabulates Penal Code offences section by section, together with their punishments — which is why the Abolition of Mandatory Death Penalty Act 2023 had to amend both the Code and that Schedule to make one change stick. Which court actually hears a given charge is a question for the court hierarchy.

Extraterritorial reach is narrow and specific. Section 4 extends the Code beyond Malaysia only for Chapters VI, VIA and VIB — offences against the State, terrorism and organised crime — and even then only in the eight situations that section lists.

Chapter IX still contains the gratification offences by public servants at sections 161 to 165; the modern anti-corruption enforcement regime is covered separately in MACC. The Code is federal law made by Parliament — see how a bill becomes law — within the framework set by the Federal Constitution.

The 2023 death-penalty amendments

The Abolition of Mandatory Death Penalty Act 2023 (Act 846) received Royal Assent on 9 June 2023, was gazetted on 16 June 2023, and came into operation on 4 July 2023 by P.U. (B) 229/2023.

It is a single amending Act touching seven statutes at once — the Penal Code, the Firearms (Increased Penalties) Act 1971 (Act 37), the Arms Act 1960 (Act 206), the Kidnapping Act 1961 (Act 365), the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 (Act 234), the Strategic Trade Act 2010 (Act 708) and the Criminal Procedure Code (Act 593). That list is the clearest available map of where Malaysia’s capital offences actually live.

Within the Penal Code, Act 846 amended 36 sections: 115, 118, 119, 121, 121A, 121B, 122, 124K, 124M, 125, 125A, 128, 130, 130A, 130B, 130C, 130D, 130I, 130J, 130K, 130KA, 130N, 130O, 130QA, 130ZB, 201, 212, 213, 214, 216, 221, 302, 307, 364, 374A and 450. Section 302 was amended by inserting, after the words “with death”, an alternative of imprisonment for not less than thirty years and not exceeding forty years, with whipping of not less than twelve strokes where the offender is not sentenced to death.

Reading the right text

The AGC’s Act 574 timeline records reprints as at 1 January 2002, 1 January 2006, 1 October 2009, 1 October 2018, 30 November 2022 (online) and 4 July 2023, with further amendments in August 2023, September 2024 and March 2025. Any consolidated text dated before 4 July 2023 predates the death-penalty reforms, and the widely circulated 1 October 2018 reprint predates them by nearly five years.

For any live question, check the current version on the AGC’s Laws of Malaysia portal rather than a cached PDF.

What’s next

This page fixes Act 574’s identity and structure. The offence definitions, the general exceptions in Chapter IV and the interaction with the Criminal Procedure Code each deserve their own treatment, and will be linked from here as they are written.

If you are tracing a specific offence, start by asking whether it is in the Code at all — section 5 means the answer is often no.