Ahmad Rahimi; Mohammad Ebrahim Shams Natri; Hassan Aalipour; Alireza Aalipanah
Abstract
AbstractThis study employs a descriptive–analytical method and library-based sources to examine the criminal protection of commercial trust through an analysis of the offence of non-disclosure of a broker’s conflict of interest under Article 346 of the Commercial Code, with reference to Article ...
Read More
AbstractThis study employs a descriptive–analytical method and library-based sources to examine the criminal protection of commercial trust through an analysis of the offence of non-disclosure of a broker’s conflict of interest under Article 346 of the Commercial Code, with reference to Article 54 of the 2024 Draft Commercial Code. It seeks to clarify the protected legal interest and the conditions governing criminal liability. The findings demonstrate that the protected value is commercial trust and the preservation of the broker’s financial impartiality. Commercial trust is conceived not merely as the personal confidence of one contracting party, but as an institutional foundation of intermediary market relations, the impairment of which may undermine the integrity and efficiency of commercial transactions. The criminal conduct consists of an omission-failure to disclose a benefit or share to an uninformed party. Accordingly, neither criminal fraud nor actual harm is required; the offence is therefore classified as a formal (conduct-based) crime. However, liability requires the broker’s knowledge of the relevant benefit or share and intentional concealment (general intent). Criminal responsibility arises upon the conclusion of a valid and legally effective transaction. Although the exclusion of punishment where the transaction fails or is declared void accords with the principles of strict interpretation and minimal criminal intervention, it may weaken deterrence and encourage risk-taking behavior regarding the duty of disclosure
mahdieh vojdani fakhr; razieh saberi; ali farhadi
Abstract
Judicial immunity has been recognized in many legal systems as a safeguard to ensure judicial independence and impartial adjudication. However, in certain circumstances, judicial decisions may result in material or moral harm to litigants, thereby conflicting with the principle of fair trial. This article ...
Read More
Judicial immunity has been recognized in many legal systems as a safeguard to ensure judicial independence and impartial adjudication. However, in certain circumstances, judicial decisions may result in material or moral harm to litigants, thereby conflicting with the principle of fair trial. This article examines the legal process and judicial practice governing claims for damages arising from judges’ fault and negligence before the High Disciplinary Court for Judges, with a particular focus on selected cases involving public funds. Employing a descriptive–analytical methodology based on documentary research, the study demonstrates that, notwithstanding the establishment of manifest fault in some cases, the High Disciplinary Court often reclassifies such conduct as “negligence” and consequently obliges the Public Fund to bear compensation. Moreover, the absence of the Ministry of Justice in the adjudicatory process increases the risk of conflicts of interest, while inadequate judicial awareness may amount to legal “fault.” The findings underscore the necessity of a more precise judicial distinction between fault and negligence, reforms in adjudicatory procedures, and the enhancement of judicial competence.
Behzad Razavi Fard; Mahdi Hamooleh
Abstract
Committing hate crimes as a violent act and intimidation against immigrants as one of the vulnerable groups, often due to their racial, national and ethnic identity, has always had a wide impact on the social relations of these groups. The problem of this research is the criminological investigation ...
Read More
Committing hate crimes as a violent act and intimidation against immigrants as one of the vulnerable groups, often due to their racial, national and ethnic identity, has always had a wide impact on the social relations of these groups. The problem of this research is the criminological investigation of hate-based crimes with an emphasis on immigrants, and from a criminological approach, it will explain the theories, approaches and causes and factors of the formation of roots leading to hatred. The research method will be descriptive-analytical with a qualitative approach, combined with in-depth (qualitative) interviews and organized through thematic analysis of the data, coding, and its interpretation to the point of theoretical saturation. In the analysis of the findings, various psychological, socio-cultural, economic and political causes and factors, each according to the current conditions and situation, can play a role as a stimulus and catalyst in the creation of crimes based on hatred towards immigrants, and the roots of its formation according to Related theories such as Agnew's general strain and Perry's structural action are analyzed. The continuous continuation of these crimes in the social structure can play a key role in the dual continuity of us and them in the immigrants and put them on the path of social disintegration, isolation and ostracism. These waves have never subsided in a world where hatred has become a part of people's daily life towards immigrants, and with each wave it can create turbulence in them.
adnan omrani far
Abstract
The penal minimalist approach, as one of the new developments in penal policies, emphasizes reducing the use of prison sentences and replacing them with corrective and preventive measures. This research aims to examine the foundations of the tendency towards penal minimalism in the Penal Reduction Law ...
Read More
The penal minimalist approach, as one of the new developments in penal policies, emphasizes reducing the use of prison sentences and replacing them with corrective and preventive measures. This research aims to examine the foundations of the tendency towards penal minimalism in the Penal Reduction Law approved in 2020 and compare it with the American legal system. The research findings show that the tendency towards penal minimalistism is rooted in criminological perspectives such as social disability theories, criminal psychology, restorative and Marxist justice, which emphasize the ineffectiveness of prison in reforming criminals and increasing the cycle of crime. From the perspective of criminal law, the reformability of criminals, reducing economic costs, proportionality of punishment, protection of human rights, and the inefficiency of the prison system are among the foundations of this approach. In the American penal system, especially after the enactment of the Prisoner Recidivism Reduction Act (2018), minimalist policies have been pursued with a focus on reducing prison terms, improving prison conditions, implementing correctional and rehabilitation programs, and reducing socio-economic inequalities in the administration of justice. In comparison to the United States, Iranian penal reforms have mainly focused on reducing custodial sentences and developing leniency institutions. The present study, which was developed using a descriptive-analytical method, shows that penal minimalism can help reduce the prison population, reduce
Heidar Piri; Akram Karim Zorab
Abstract
The issue of child soldiers lies at the intersection of two concepts: victim and perpetrator. This dual status has not only led to divergent views on their prosecution but has also posed a fundamental challenge to the international criminal justice system. This descriptive-analytical study, focusing ...
Read More
The issue of child soldiers lies at the intersection of two concepts: victim and perpetrator. This dual status has not only led to divergent views on their prosecution but has also posed a fundamental challenge to the international criminal justice system. This descriptive-analytical study, focusing on the Dominic Ongwen case before the ICC, examines whether the existing normative framework, particularly the Rome Statute, is effective in articulating the criminal responsibility of child soldiers and striking a balance between their status as victims and offenders.Findings indicate that international jurisprudence, despite the prohibition on recruiting children under the age of 15, exhibits confusion and a lack of transparent standards when dealing with children above this age. The Ongwen case reveals that traditional criteria for attributing criminal responsibility and general defenses such as duress, necessity, or mental incapacity are insufficient, on their own, to explain the complex situation of these children and are applied restrictively and cautiously. The main contribution of this article is to argue for the necessity of adopting an integrated approach that, on one hand, deals realistically with the principal perpetrators of crimes and, on the other hand, protects children as the most vulnerable actors in conflicts by taking into account their specific circumstances of coercion and victimization. Consequently, evolution in judicial interpretation and normative strengthening in this area is inevitable.
farhad Allahverdi meygouni
Abstract
Narrative criminology has emerged over the past two decades as a dynamic theoretical approach within the study of crime and deviance. In contrast to mainstream criminology, which has traditionally understood criminal action as the product of variables such as economic deprivation, personality disorder, ...
Read More
Narrative criminology has emerged over the past two decades as a dynamic theoretical approach within the study of crime and deviance. In contrast to mainstream criminology, which has traditionally understood criminal action as the product of variables such as economic deprivation, personality disorder, or institutional dysfunction, narrative criminology shifts the analytical focus to the constitutive, directive, and justificatory power of stories. From this perspective, individuals do not commit crime simply because they possess a particular attribute; rather, they act within and through the narratives that lend coherence, direction, and legitimacy to their lives. The approach is a legitimate product of the broader "narrative turn" in the humanities and social sciences—an intellectual current with roots in poststructuralism and critical theories of language, which proposes that human experience is not accessed directly, but is shaped, represented, and transmitted through narrative structures. It is crucial to note that this emphasis on narrative should not be narrowly interpreted as a focus solely on the oral accounts of offenders; the approach recognizes a wide range of narrative sources, including victims' accounts, official documents, oral histories, media texts, and broader cultural narratives embedded in literature, film, and political discourse.
Despite its rapid growth over the past decade, narrative criminology continues to face pressing questions regarding its theoretical status. A distinct research gap is evident in the literature, which can be summarized along three axes. First, existing studies have largely either explicated the approach's capacities or critiqued it from external perspectives, such as those of positivist or structuralist traditions; an evaluation based on its own stated criteria—an immanent critique—is rarely undertaken. Second, theoretical discussions have paid insufficient attention to recurrent misconceptions about the approach, which inadvertently recall the very positivist foundations it promised to transcend. Third, while there is general acknowledgment of the approach's limitations, these have rarely been subjected to systematic formulation. This article addresses these gaps by asking whether narrative criminology has genuinely moved beyond the prevailing assumptions of mainstream criminology, or has merely reproduced classical concepts in new language.
The article proceeds in three interconnected analytical steps. The first reconstructs the theoretical orientation and conceptual apparatus of narrative criminology. Drawing on modern narratology, narrative is defined as the meaningful organization of events through two fundamental elements: story (the set of narrated events) and plot (the causal and meaningful relations among these events). In the criminological context, this organization foregrounds three core analytical dimensions: narrative causality, which addresses how narrative provides a meaningful context within which harmful action becomes comprehensible and justified; characterization of offender and victim, rooted in Goffman's dramaturgical approach, which involves the distribution of moral positions—who is cast as hero, victim, or villain—and is never neutral, always linked to the allocation of responsibility; and narrative identity, which explores how self-stories justify past action and set the stage for future conduct, while recognizing that offender self-narratives are often not coherent and unified, but multidimensional, fragmented, and marked by "narrative hot spots" where tensions become apparent.
The second step identifies and critiques three fundamental misconceptions that undermine the approach's critical potential. The first is its reduction to mere storytelling, which ignores the approach's analytical engagement with narrative discourse—how events are organized into meaning—rather than the raw content of the story. The second is its reduction to a research method, such as narrative interviewing, which overlooks the crucial epistemological distinction between narrative as a data-collection tool and narrative as a paradigm. The third, relatedly, is the treatment of narrative as a tool for discovering an objective, positivist "truth," rather than focusing on what Sandberg (2010) terms narrative truth, where the analytical value lies in the identity-constructing and performative functions of storytelling, even when it involves deception.
The third and most substantial step turns to the internal tensions that arise from the approach's own logic. The first and most fundamental is narrative silence, formulated on two distinct but intertwined levels. One is traumatic silence: the narrator's inability to articulate experience due to the severity of psychological harm. This is not a simple absence but an active, socially-constructed space where usual linguistic frameworks break down, posing a profound methodological paradox—narrative criminology needs narrative to understand its effects, yet narrative fails precisely where the most damaging experiences are located. This "narrative pause" at critical moments is not limited to victims; studies of violent offenders show a similar narrative breakdown when describing the moment of violence itself. The second level concerns the non-discursive: language's own incapacity to fully represent dimensions of experience—embodied habits, pre-linguistic affects, practical skills, automatic reactions—that are thoroughly real and consequential yet resist narrativization. This challenge is especially acute in two areas: violence and incarceration. The concept of "carceral habitus" (Page & Goodmann, 2020) illustrates how the embodied, habitual dimensions of prison experience cannot be fully captured through inmate interviews alone.
The second internal tension is the politics of narrative, concerning the approach's relationship with power. This operates at two complementary levels. At the pre-narrative level, unequal power relations determine whose narrative is heard and whose remains unheard—a structural silencing that raises the ethical question of whether narrative criminology should actively seek to restore voice to the marginalized. At the post-narrative level, narratives are always produced within specific "discursive orders" shaped by criminal justice institutions, media, and the academy itself, and are perpetually susceptible to appropriation by more powerful institutions. Against the danger of "narrative voyeurism"—consuming stories of suffering for academic pleasure without ethical commitment—the article argues for a reflexive narrative approach that accepts the "responsibility of witnessing": a committed presence in the face of the other's narrative, with critical empathy and constant awareness of the researcher's own position within circuits of power.
The central argument of the article is that the tension between narrative and its non-discursive remainders—traumatic silence, embodied habits, structurally imposed silences—is not an epistemological flaw, but the very condition of possibility for narrative criminology itself. If everything were reducible to narrative, the approach would risk collapsing into a tautology: "narrative constructs crime and we analyze narrative." The way out of this impasse is to acknowledge precisely those things that escape narrative. Taking these tensions seriously does not require negating the approach, but rather delimiting its claims and re-theorizing its status. Narrative criminology remains faithful to its theoretical promise only when it abandons totalizing ambitions and redefines itself as a "boundary-conscious analytical lens"—a lens whose value lies not in eliminating what lies outside narrative, but in illuminating the dynamic relationship between the narrative and those remainders that refuse to be fully narrated. This redefinition carries a practical corollary: the narrative criminological researcher must adopt a reflexive orientation, aware of their own position of power, and committed to situated, partial explanations of crime stories, with sensitivity to power as an internal logic of analysis rather than an external appendix.
Keywords: narrative criminology, narrative turn, crime stories, narrative causality, narrative silence, politics of narrative.
