Brunei said new laws imposing the death penalty for gay sex and adultery were designed more for “prevention than to punish” in response to the United Nations’ condemnation of the measures.

The United Nations said the Muslim-majority former British protectorate violated human rights on April 3 by implementing Islamic laws which punish sodomy, adultery and rape with the death penalty, including by stoning, and theft with amputation.

But Erywan Yusof, Brunei’s second minister of foreign affairs, defended the new laws in a letter to the United Nations, saying the move was focused more on “prevention than punishment”.

“Its aim is to educate, deter, rehabilitate and nurture rather than to punish,” Yusof wrote to the United Nations.

In the letter Yusof said the offences would not apply to non-Muslims in Brunei, which has been at the center of a media storm since it announced the rollout of more Sharia laws in March. Its U.N. letter said the “criminalization of adultery and sodomy is to safeguard the sanctity of family lineage and marriage of individual Muslims particularly women”. Read more via Thomson Reuters Foundation