Malaysia’s parliament passed three bills last week related to decriminalizing suicide, marking a momentous shift in how the largely taboo topic is treated in the country and making the Southeast Asian nation of over 33 million people the latest in a growing list of countries that are amending suicide legislation.

In March, Ghana’s parliament passed a bill to decriminalize attempted suicide. Guyana did the same in November last year, followed by Pakistan in December. India and Singapore changed their laws in 2018 and 2020, respectively. These reforms come amid a global push by mental health advocates and academics to overturn punitive approaches to preventing suicides.

Still, attempting suicide remains illegal in at least 19 countries—including Nigeria, Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Myanmar—many of which inherited their rules on the matter from British common law. But while the U.K. decriminalized suicide in 1961, it has taken decades for some former colonies to do the same. (Meanwhile, Jordan just criminalized attempting suicide last year, and sentenced a man to a month of imprisonment for the charge earlier this month.)

As Malaysia deals with rising suicide rates and concerningly high suicidal ideation among teenagers in particular, mental health advocates have long criticized the use of Section 309 of the country’s Penal Code, which carries up to one year in jail, and/or a fine, for those attempting suicide. As recently as 2020, a Malaysian man was sentenced to six months in jail after a suicide attempt, sparking calls for reform to what experts say is, at its root, a mental health issue.

“The existence of Section 309 was a provision from the 19th century because it was seen at the time that criminalizing suicide would be an act of prevention,” Deputy Law Minister Ramkarpal Singh said in May. “But nowadays, medical treatment, and not prosecution, is the best way to address the matter, based on approaches by other countries.”