Parliament to discuss criminalizing foreign officials’ bribery

CAIRO – 8 January 2018: New amendments to the Penal Code will be discussed in the Egyptian Parliament, starting Monday, to criminalize the bribery of foreign public officials and to impose severe penalty to the increasing children abduction.

It is part of Egypt’s commitment to the United Nations Convention against Corruption, ratified in 2005, and it is a move to strengthen its institutions in the fight against corruption.

Since the bribery of public officials is not criminalized under the Anti-Money Laundering Law, amendments will be introduced to the Penalty Code to criminalize the bribery of foreign public employees.

Article 106 is added to the law. It states that if any foreign official or public international institution employee demands for himself or for a third party or takes a gift or donation to refrain from or perform one of his international duties, he shall be considered to be a bribe-taker. Punishment will be life in prison and a fine of not less than LE 500 and not more than double what he took or what he was promised to take.

In addition, the definition of the foreign public official and public international institution employee is added to the law, stipulating that a foreign public employee is whoever occupies legislative, executive, administrative or judiciary position at a foreign country or any person who occupies public position for any foreign country, while the public international institution employee is any international civil user whose institution allows him to perform on its behalf.

Criminalizing this kind of bribery aims to make employees perform their public services for the public interests not to further their own interests, especially given that foreign workers, either in public sectors or governmental institutions, have marked an increase of 51.8 percent in 2015, according to a press statement issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in June, 2016.

Moreover, due to the increasing cases of children and women abduction in Egypt for the purpose of human and organ trafficking, articles 283, 289 and 290 in the Penalty Code were amended as they could allow for impunity of some offenders.

Consequently, the amended Article 283 stipulates that an offender who hides a newborn child, replaces him or sells him to potential parents with new identities shall be punished with no less than three years in prison.

Furthermore, Article 289 points out that if kidnapping is accompanied with ransom demands, the offender shall be imprisoned severely for not less than 15 years and not more than 20 years. Yet, offenders will be sentenced to death if the abduction is accompanied with a crime.