Defendant’s Legal Rights in Criminal Prosecution Alternatives

In the light of comparative law developments in recent years, the Criminal Procedure Code of 2013 has introduced numerous institutions and mechanisms into the Iranian criminal justice system that, through the emergence of a concurrent justice, prosecution of the accused is suspended in exchange for some of the orders suggested by the prosecutor or reconciliation with the plaintiff. Proper implementation of these strategies, which are interpreted as alternatives to criminal prosecution, has shortened the intervention of the criminal system and accelerated the resolution of disputes arising out of the crime, giving the accused an opportunity not to stay immune from criminal labeling without getting involved with the criminal process and compensating the victim’s damages in a short time. Successors of prosecution, however, face challenges such as the ambiguous status of the defendant’s rights. In fact, the nature of such proceedings raises many questions, including whether the right to defense in these proceedings differs from that of ordinary criminal proceedings? And are the defendants’ rights observed in the same way as classical rights? This article seeks to provide appropriate solutions to these rights for these methods by studying and criticizing the legal rights of the accused in prosecution alternatives.