CRIMINAL PROTECTION FOR INVESTMENT IN PALESTINIAN AND COMPARATIVE LEGISLATION
In normal conditions, States seek to improve and strengthen their investment situation by attracting investment and capital, especially foreign ones Therefore, many States, when legislating investment laws, focus on how to encourage investors to invest within them. This is what the State of Palestine and the Arab States generally tended to do through their incentives, guarantees, customs exemptions or taxfixing mechanism, all with a view to attracting them to invest within their States The emergence of investment contracts dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the advent of the industrial revolution in Europe and before the beginning of the First World War, many development projects involving airports emerged. And transportation routes where governments realized their importance, so they handed them over to investors, The French government is the first to apply international investment contracts in 1682, which were represented by the bot contract and the first Arab country to undertake international investment contracts was Egypt, where it entered into a contract to establish the Suez Canal The importance of the penal protection of investment, both internal and external, is not disputed, especially since legislators in many Arab States, especially Palestine, are geared towards supporting and encouraging investment that may be needed to protect investment, requiring some balance in attracting investment and protecting the national economy The study examined the legal regulation of penal protection for investment in Palestinian and comparative legislation and the adequacy of such penal protection contained in the Palestinian Investment Promotion Act No. 1 of 1998 and its amendments or the Palestinian Penal Code, particularly with certain Arab investment legislation, such as Egypt, Jordan, and the Sultanate of Oman, in a comparative analysis This research is based on the analytical descriptive approach in its preparation, through substantive and procedural treatment, from a legislative policy perspective to monitor the Palestinian legislator's role and comparison in investment protection, objectively at the levels of criminalization and punishment, as well as procedurally at both the evidentiary and investigative, trial and appeal stages The study concluded by moving away from the traditional approach to criminalization introduced by Jordan in 2011 with the development of an independent system of economic crimes, as well as Egypt's adoption of a law on economic courts at substantive as well as procedural levels
Keywords: Penal Protection, Investment, Economic Crime, Palestinian and Comparative Legislation