Recognizing the Position and Validity of Assistant Prosecutor's Decisions in the Irani Judicial System

After rehabilitation of prosecutor’s offices in the Iranian judicial system in 2002, the proceeding and sentence issuance stage was assigned to the criminal tribunals, and other criminal proceeding stages including crime detection, accused’ prosecution and investigation and in general the primary investigations and ultimately enforcing the criminal judge and punishment of offender was assigned to the prosecutor’s office. Contrary to the interrogator that principally is independent from public prosecutor, the assistant prosecutor as one of judicial authorities of prosecutor’s office is not independent from public prosecutor and as the representative of the public prosecutor is authorized to apply the preliminary investigations in the criminal cases, moreover to fulfill other duties of public prosecutor. Although the assistant prosecutor is not independent from public prosecutor and is entitled to disagree with the opinion of public prosecutor but yet all decisions made by the assistant prosecutor is not subject to the agreement and comment of public prosecutor. The dependence of assistant prosecutor and necessity of his obedience from public prosecutor is not arising out of and limited to the type and nature of the duty assigned to the assistant prosecutor, and the assistant prosecutor regardless of duty assigned by the public prosecutor shall obey the public prosecutor. In this paper, in addition to identifying the position of assistant prosecutor in the prosecutor’s office, the scope of his independence from public prosecutor and its principles and the validity of decisions made by this judicial authority is considered.