The I·CONnect-Clough Center 2019 Global Review of Constitutional Law : Iran

The year 2019 for the Iran jurisdiction, in a nutshell, was a year characterized by intense polarization, with a deterioration of recent critical developments in the jurisdiction. In 2019, the two fundamental characteristics of the Constitution, Islamic and Republican, representing the Shia-Islamic thoughts and the democratic tendencies of the structure, got closer to breaking points.This year, the most critical development was the regulation passed via the Supreme Council for Economic Coordination (SCEC), a partial legislation institution created by a Leader decree since 2018. The regulations passed by the SCEC aggregated the weakening of the Islamic Consultative Assembly (ICA) in multiple dimensions. The way of passing these regulations revealed a neglected democratic procedure laid in the Constitution. These regulations heated the arguments on the constitutionality of the SCEC on the one hand; on the other hand, they uncovered a pattern of establishment of partial legislation. This pattern shows the use of decree power in favor of partial legislation, which is gradually covering all legislation jurisdictions of the parliament, which dismantle the authority of the people's representatives. This development is in line to the authoritarianism of the Shia-Islamic thoughts of the Constitution.The year also experience new appointments among the members of the judicial review body, the Guardian Council (GC), which is the correspondent body for a constitutional court though simultaneously has the most crucial role of the country's electoral commission. For the first time in its history, the Leader announced the General Policies of the System of Legislation (GPSL), which frames an official and desirable Islamic Legislation Model of the current Shia school in power.The latest developments in 2019 contain two long-awaited pieces of legislation that have been eventually passed and one critical bill that was finally considered unconstitutional. The first law passed concerned the acquisition of Iranian nationality for children of Iranian women married to a foreigner. The second law passed featured new provisions for the first time. It introduces the death penalty as a punishment for acid spraying and protects the victims of such crimes.The bills considered unconstitutional aimed to follow international recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global standard-setting body for Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism. Since the bills are now unconstitutional, the FATF will put Iran at a high risk of being ranked on an international blacklist for investments