Population Growth through Criminal Interventions; A Look to the Approval Process and the Challenges of the Implementation of the Youthful Population and Protection of the Family Law

The Policymakers’ concern over the decline in the population growth in the recent two decades make several plans and policies be suggested to change this process. The Youthful Population and Protection of the Family Law (2021) presents the last will (intention) of the legislature to reverse this process. Besides the supportive and encouraging policies, this law has seen different prohibitions and restrictions in the realm of screening and supplying tools for fertility control (birth control), legal sterilization and abortion. Along with these cases, like the most specific rules (lex specialis) it has been considered criminal strategies by the legislature and has been tried for the primary purpose of those who codified the law i.e. the population growth to occur. However, the legislature’s criminal intervention from the different aspects encompasses problems (objectable). These problems can be for the process of codifying law and its executive problems from one division. Criminalization with the minimum participation of the assembly and legislation through the emergency route of article 85 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not paying attention to previous regulations resulting in the penal legislation inflation (the increase in the number of penal laws), referring to the most accessible tool i.e. sentencing and the vanguard of the punitiveness at the circumstance of the lack of the comparative study of the non-criminal strategies it goes back to the process of enacting laws. On the other side, the ambiguity in the type of sanctions including the use of interpretable vocabulary such as “substantial, comprehensive, vast, effective factors and the business circle” and determining the type of punishment to each degree and also the problem for enforcing punishment upon legal entities are of the most important problems that the law will face challenges in the stage of implementation. This note tries to realize and identify the most important challenges and the problems of the criminal interventions of the law in the stage of legislation and enforcement with a descriptive-analytic approach.