analyzing the process of the guardian council’s jurisprudential review on the legislations of majlis case study of the islamic penal act

the guardian council, as the sole competent authority to jurisprudential review on the legislations of majlis, plays an unique role in the preservation of islamic criteria in the field of legislation. in this paper, through a case study, studying the process of the guardian council’s jurisprudential review on the islamic penal act, as the most prominent criminal legislation, from the perspective of authenticating the compatibility with the sharia’s criteria, is tried. in this regard, through investigating the comments of the guardian council in examining the penal law, it is tried, while clarifying the dominant fatwā, which is the criterion of this evaluation, to analyze the manner of this review with a critical approach, so that a step in order to express the way of realizing this aspect of the supervision is carried out. this study shows that the enacted text of the judicial and legal commission of the islamic consultative assembly (majlis) have contained several defects with respect to islamic criteria, which the guardian council in its monitoring process, has warned many of them, and sometimes in an innovative way by providing the solutions to remove the incompatibility, has guided the commission to amend the enacted text correctly. in spite of the great merits of the council’s performance in reviewing on the act, some controversial cases are evident in the process. on the one hand, the dominant fatwā with which the enacted text is evaluated isn’t the same at all stages of supervision and in some cases, mentioned jurisprudential defects are not justified. the examination of the very critical phase of authenticating the debugging the enacted text by the council shows that sometimes the reforms applied by the commission are not controlled precisely.