Criminal Law
Hossein Aghababaei
Abstract
In Iranian criminal law, in addition to criminalizing insults to persons, which are interpreted as simple insults In Iranian criminal law and have a private and forgivable aspect, there are several instances of insults with a general description of aggravated criminal insults. While they have more severe ...
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In Iranian criminal law, in addition to criminalizing insults to persons, which are interpreted as simple insults In Iranian criminal law and have a private and forgivable aspect, there are several instances of insults with a general description of aggravated criminal insults. While they have more severe punishments, their most important and common feature is that they have a public and unforgivable aspect, and because of this feature, regardless of the real victim's complaint, the public prosecutor, assuming he is aware of the crime or its report, is obliged to prosecute the offender and bring him to justice. According to Article 11 of the Law on Reduction of Imprisonment, approved in 2020, one of the cases of aggravated insult, i.e. insulting officials and employees while serving, is excluded from the category of unforgivable crimes and the general aspect of this crime has been removed. This legal change and the subsequent judicial procedure, from the perspective of structural coordination and efficiency of criminal policy regarding the crime of insulting the authorities, have created questions and challenges that have been addressed in this study through analytical and interpretive methods. In this study, by examining the challenges arising from the deprivation of the public aspect of the crime of insulting the authorities, it is proposed to amend the law or provide a favourable judicial interpretation to resolve the problems.
