Dr. Mustafa Abdel Baki
Assistant Professor of Criminal Law
Faculty of Law – Birzeit University – Palestine

Abstract:

Bribery is an agreement between two parties; one offers an advantage or service to the other who accepts it for doing or refraining from doing a job relating to his/her job or mission. The importance of this research stems from the dialectic based on the appropriateness of limiting the crime of bribery to public officials and the likes, as a crime against public office and public administration, or extending it to private sector workers as well. Its scope will be limited to the crime of bribery in terms of its concept, nature and elements, per the laws in force in the West Bank compared to the 2003 United Nations Convention against Corruption, the Arab Convention against Corruption of 2010 and the Model Penal Code. By adopting a comparative, descriptive, analytical approach, the research is divided into two sections; the first section highlights what the crime of bribery is and the second deals with its elements.
Many conclusions have been arrived at in this research. These state that the spread of bribery undermines a fundamental pillar of society, namely, the confidence of citizens in the State and its employees; and that the exclusion of legislators the private sector workers from criminalization may harm employers. The recommendations put forward by the author call for standardizing the definition of the ‘civil servant’ in public service laws and penalties; not only criminalizing actual staffing, but rather explicitly stipulating the inclusion of private sector workers. It also calls for imposing other consequential penalties on the perpetrator of the crime of bribery as well as denying them any public service jobs such as denial of candidacy and voting in general and local elections, and that the legislator imposes penalties for the moral person in case of committing the bribery crime.
Keywords: Public Servant, Bribe-giver, Bribe-taker, Corruption, Anti-Corruption.

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