Regular Assignment of Judicial Cases from the Perspective of Judicial Independence: A Comparative Study in Iranian Law and International Documents

Assignment of cases to judicial authorities where there are multiple branches of court is the prerequisite for checking existence of jurisdiction and exercise of it. Ensuring actual and apparent independence of the judicial system requires that assigning of cases to the courts would be in jurisdiction of authority that placed in the judiciary and the executive and the legislature powers and parties of dispute should not be able to interfere in this issue. Assignment of cases must be made by a competent judicial authority or supervised by him. Assignment of cases can be made in various forms that in this paper they has been studied from the perspective of judicial independence. There are different arrangements for the assignment of cases that can be summarized on two kinds: “random assignment” and “specialized assignment”. The second kind is the kind that Iranian law emphasizes. Judicial independence requires that with assignment the case to the court, except in cases prescribed by law, there is no possibility of returning it. This paper has attempted to explain the rules governing the assignment of case with their adaption with international standards of fair trial (and especially judicial independence).