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Iran's Guardians Council set on winning
ways
By Golnaz Esfandiari
PRAGUE - Iran's Guardians Council (GC) is one of
the most powerful bodies in the Islamic Republic. It
oversees presidential and parliamentary elections, as
well as elections for the Assembly of Experts, a
constitutional body that chooses the supreme leader, the
country's highest authority. In this regard, the GC has
the right to veto candidates for office whose views it
deems as unIslamic.
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a
leading hardline cleric, heads the GC, which has 12
members. Six of them are clerics directly appointed by
the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The six
others are jurists nominated by the head of Iran's
judiciary - who is himself appointed by the Supreme
Leader - and approved by parliament. The members of the
GC serve six-year terms.
The scope of the GC's
vetting rights is open to debate, however. Reformists
say that factional political interests motivate many of
the council's decisions. Mehrangiz Kar is a prominent
Iranian-born lawyer and human-rights activist who lives
in Washington. She says Iranian laws give the
conservative oversight body a free hand: "The Guardians
Council's hands are not tied at all, according to the
election law passed in 1999. Its supervisory duty was
characterized as approbatory, according to which it can
act in a totally political manner, rather than
impartially, and can disqualify election candidates on
the basis of its own factional leniency - meaning the
factional leniency of the conservatives."
Many
see the GC's right to disqualify candidates as a major
obstacle to free, fair and competitive elections in
Iran. The council's recent disqualification of more than
3,000 pro-reform candidates - including some 80 sitting
parliamentarians - from next month's elections (February
20) was widely interpreted as an attempt to gain control
over the future parliament. The GC has since reinstated
200 of those candidates.
Several months ago, the
GC established offices in all of the country's provinces
to monitor potential parliamentary candidates. Reformist
officials harshly criticized the move, saying that the
GC should carry out its supervisory tasks "only at the
time of the elections".
Mohammad Seyfzadeh is a
lawyer in Tehran and a member of the Center of Human
Rights Defenders, which was founded by 2003 Nobel Peace
Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. Seyfzadeh says that the GC
has overstepped its legal boundaries and is acting
unconstitutionally: "The Guardians Council has not
fulfilled its legal responsibilities in respect to the
parliamentary elections because, legally, supervising
entails an act of watching. What the Guardians Council
has been doing is absolute interference in the affairs
of the executive branch, and it is against the laws and
the constitution."
Under Iran's constitution,
the GC is also assigned the role of checking the
compatibility of legislation passed by parliament with
Islamic laws and the constitution. The GC is also
responsible for the interpretation of the country's
constitution.
Most observers agree the GC
interprets its authority very broadly. Kar said: "[The
Guardians Council] has undermined the parliamentary
immunity of the MPs by interpreting the immunity clause
in the constitution in a fashion that is in total
contradiction with that clause. As a result, many of the
MPs who expressed their critical views regarding state
matters were either persecuted or legally pursued - and
[one was] even incarcerated."
Kar adds that the
GC's interpretation of the constitution has deprived
parliament of many of its rights, including its ability
to investigate state institutions: "With its
interpretation of the constitution, the Guardians
Council has deprived parliament of its right to conduct
probes - meaning that the Guardians Council has said
that all institutions whose heads are appointed by the
[Supreme] Leader should be excluded. So it has excluded
many institutions and foundations from the parliamentary
probe."
The GC has rejected many pro-reform
bills passed by parliament as unconstitutional and
contrary to Islamic laws. They include a bill banning
torture to obtain confessions from prisoners and another
that defined political crimes and conditions for
political prisoners.
Shaul Bakhash is a
professor of Middle East history at George Mason
University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings
Institution think tank, both in the US. He believes the
GC is restricting civil rights in Iran: "The Council of
Guardians, as you know, just in the last year or two,
has blocked Iran's participation or signing of
international agreements on the equal rights of women,
legislation against torture, and similar bills. So
clearly, it has interpreted the constitution in its own
role, in a manner that greatly restricts individual
freedoms and civil liberties."
The rejected
bills are either sent back to parliament to be amended
or to the Expediency Council for arbitration. In the
past, the Expediency Council has almost always sided
with the GC.
Though there are other institutions
in Iran that also seek to quash efforts aimed at reform,
Bakhash says the GC wields particular power: "It's not
the only obstacle to reform in Iran. It's part of a
number of institutions, personalities, and organizations
on the conservative or hardline side which in the last
four or five years have frustrated the efforts of the
reformers and the legislation they hoped to pass. Many
of the senior clerics, the supreme leader himself, the
elements in the Revolutionary Guards - all these, I
think, have been obstacles to the agenda of the
reformists. But, since the Guardians Council can veto
legislation, it obviously plays a very important role in
this endeavor."
Rights activist Kar says the GC
has neutralized many pro-reform initiatives passed by a
parliament elected by the people: "Iran's legal
structure allows the Guardians Council's clerics to veto
the resolutions passed by parliament that are deemed as
being against Islamic laws. So in that case, the bill
does not become law. And in such a legal structure, we
cannot say that the parliament is independent. It means
that we are deprived of an independent parliament [in
Iran]."
In a report, the UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights called the Guardians Council a major
obstacle to the development of democracy in Iran. Kar
believes Iran's current legal structure and constitution
prevents democracy from being achieved in Iran: "I think
in the framework of the current constitution and in the
framework of the current legal structure, democratic
moves to fulfill popular demands - as well as claims
made by the reformists - are essentially not
attainable."
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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