Jurisprudence and Legal Nature of the Right to Exploit Water Resources in the Iranian law

In the set of laws and regulations regarding Iran's water resources, the legal relationship of individuals with these resources is referred to as the right of exploitation. This is based on jurisprudence and legal principles that recognize water as a common trust and in other words, a public trust, and negate any right to ownership for the user. However, due to the ambiguity in the legal nature of this exploitation right, we continue to witness the possessive behavior of the exploiters and the conflicting opinions of the administrative and legal authorities in this regard. Therefore, in this analytical and descriptive study, we examined the jurisprudential and legal foundations of the subject and then put forward the theories that have been established in the relevant laws based on the shared and trust nature of this public wealth. Then, referring to Article 29 of the Civil Law, which is in the position of expressing the various rights that individuals have in relation to property and in which the right to ownership, including the object and benefit, the right to usufruct and easement, the characteristics of the right of exploitation, we observed an affinity for usufruct rights in the Iranian right of water exploitation. Therefore, under this legal nature, we came to the conclusion that the water users are not entitled to any kind of proprietary policy, including the right to transfer and waste this right, and the government that has this public trust supervises water sources and uses by prescribing and adjusting exploitation licenses according to public interests and regardless of the proprietary behaviors.