The Analysis of the Legislative Discourse on Criminal Intervention in the Conflict of Interest Situations

Corruption prevention always faces serious challenges in the legislative, judicial, and executive areas. The intervention of the criminal justice system has often been focused on the behavior of blue-collar citizens. On the other hand, the ideological approach toward the economy and economic crimes has resulted in the dominance of retrospective and punitive mechanisms, and this lot of posterior intervention has been focused more on corruption in the public sector while, following the government's downsizing policies, a significant part of the economy has been privatized. This study aims to analyze the existing regulations on the conflict of interest, as the main cause of corruption. It also examines the necessity of criminalizing conflict of interest as an independent and stand-alone crime. Conflict of interest refers to a situation in which a person with public authority status has secondary interests that conflict with their public duties. Hence, by examining the laws related to conflict of interest crimes as well as the principles related to criminalization, the status of conflict of interest in the Iranian legal system has been evaluated and the necessity of criminal intervention has been investigated. The present study applied a descriptive-analytical approach to examine the field of anti-corruption regulations using library sources. The findings of this study indicate that, since conflict of interest has not been recognized as an independent crime by the legislature, there is a weakness in the existing legislative interventions regarding corruption prevention, especially with respect to conflict of interest cases. Therefore, this study proposes recognition of conflict of interest as an independent and stand-alone crime.