Iran's Criminal Policy Regarding Decarceration with Emphasis on the 2020 Law Reducing Ta'zir Imprisonment Penalties مقالة

خلاصة:

If we conduct a study on the legislative process from the beginning until today, i.e., from 1925 to 2020, Iran's criminal policy has moved away from incarceration-oriented approaches and has been steered towards decarceration. However, there is an exception in the 1996 Penal Code, which adhered to incarceration. During the era of Reza Shah I, between 1925 and 1941, policy was generally more focused on exile and flogging. In the 1973 approved law, considering the suffocating atmosphere of the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi era, efforts were made to reduce the penal population by emphasizing decarceration to calm the country's atmosphere. In 1982, with the growing role of religion and pure Muhammadan Islam, the doors of Islamic leniency opened, and decarceration was observed in its true sense, as Islam has always been opposed to imprisonment. This trend continued during the Islamic Revolution period until it persisted in the 1996 Islamic Penal Code; however, the legislator in this law insisted more on incarceration, such that long-term imprisonments increased during this period. In the 2013 Islamic Penal Code, the classification of penalties and the introduction of alternative punishments significantly contributed to decarceration. In Chapter Nine, from Articles 64 to 87 of the Islamic Penal Code, a major step was taken, and the law reducing Ta'zir imprisonment penalties with 15 clauses was approved by the Islamic Consultative Assembly in 2020. In this law, while reducing the penalty (not just imprisonment) for certain Ta'zir crimes, many concepts and institutions of criminal law or their domains were changed, such as compoundable crimes, multiple offenses, recidivism, specific instances of attempt and complicity in crime, reduction of penalty, conversion of penalty, suspension of penalty, alternatives to imprisonment, supplementary penalties, semi-liberty systems, electronic monitoring, sentencing, and court jurisdictions. This law also imposes an obligation on judges that when applying imprisonment penalties, they must use the minimum prison sentence as a criterion; if they intend to impose a sentence greater than the minimum, they must explicitly state the reasons for increasing the imprisonment penalty beyond the legal minimum in the verdict. Otherwise, this matter, in addition to being a 4th-degree disciplinary violation for the judicial official, will be grounds for overturning the verdict in higher authorities.