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The Royal Malaysian Customs Department, acting under the Ministry of Finance's power in subsection 31(1) of the Customs Act 1967, gazetted a second 2025 amendment to the Customs (Prohibition of Imports) Order 2023. The amendment adds dummy seat-belt buckles and related defeat-devices to the Order's prohibited-goods schedule. The measure followed enforcement findings — cited in local press coverage — that during a Chinese New Year traffic operation in Negeri Sembilan, nearly 30% of 195 motorists cited for not wearing seat belts had used a dummy buckle to silence the vehicle's seat-belt warning chime. The prohibition takes effect 31 December 2025, giving importers and retailers a roughly six-month wind-down window from the June 2025 announcement.
This sits alongside Malaysia's broader vehicle-safety enforcement push (dashcam and telematics mandates, ASEAN NCAP alignment) and is a narrow, product-specific import ban rather than a tariff or industrial-policy instrument — its IPTM relevance is as a non-tariff barrier / trade restriction on a specific automotive-parts product line.
carrying dummy buckles / seat-belt silencers must clear existing stock or re-export before 31 December 2025.
right-hand-drive markets (analogous to Türkiye's Tebliğ 2026/14 import surveillance on genuine seat-belt hardware) may look to when framing vehicle-safety-equipment trade restrictions.
ADAS-defeat accessories (e.g., seatbelt-reminder OBD disablers) beyond the physical buckle-clip category.
non-compliant shipments was disclosed in the sources reviewed; the full gazette text of the Amendment (No. 2) Order itself was not independently retrievable from this VPS during research — the primary citation above is to the principal 2023 Order it amends, on Malaysia's Attorney General's Chambers federal legislation portal.