Access To Justice In Iran

A critical and in-depth analysis of access to justice from international and Islamic perspectives, with a specific focus on access by women.

This book proposes an approach that guarantees access to justice for victims of international institutional conduct without compromising institutional independence.

Includes papers presented as a conference in SIngapore in 2017.--ECIP acknowledgments.

This report offers an empirical tool to help planners, statisticians, policy makers and advocates understand people's everyday legal problems and experience with the justice system. It sets out a framework for the conceptualisation, implementation and analysis of legal needs surveys and is informed by analysis of a wide range of national surveys conducted over the last 25 years. It provides guidance and recommendations in a modular way, allowing application into different types of surveys. It also outlines opportunities for legal needs-based indicators that strengthen our understanding of access to civil justice.

This book examines economic inequality and social disparity in Iran, together with their drivers, over the past four decades. During this period, income distribution and economic welfare were affected by the 1979 Revolution, the eight-year war with Iraq, post-war privatization and economic liberalization initiatives carried out under the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations, the ascendance of a populist economic platform under the Ahmadinejad administration, and the lifting of energy and financial sanctions under the Rouhani administration. Featuring a mix of scholars, including Iranian academics who experienced these changes and are publishing in English for the first time, this collection offers quantitative and descriptive studies of the country's post-revolutionary economic development and disparities. In most chapters, a hypothesis is developed from existing theories or observations, which is then tested using available data. This unique combination of new voices, academic as well as personal experiences, and scientific methods will be a valuable addition to the library of the scholars of modern Iran’s economy and society.

Iran's continued retention of discriminatory laws stands in stark contrast to the advances Iranian women have made in other spheres since the Revolution in 1979. Leila Alikarami here aims to determine the extent to which the actions of women's rights activists have led to a significant change in their legal status. She argues that while Iranian women have not yet obtained legal equality, the gender bias of the Iranian legal system has been successfully challenged and has lost its legitimacy. More pertinently, the social context has become more prepared to accommodate legal rights for women. Highlighting the key challenges that proponents of gender equality face in the Muslim context, Alikarami attempts to ascertain the causes of Iran's failure to ratify the CEDAW and questions whether and to what extent interpretations of Islamic principles prevent Iran from doing so. Applying feminist legal theory to contemporary Iran, Alikarami's approach re-evaluates the underlying principles that have shaped the struggle for equal rights between the sexes.

How do ordinary people access justice? This book offers a novel socio-legal approach to access to justice, alternative dispute resolution, vulnerability and energy poverty. It poses an access to justice challenge and rethinks it through a lens that accommodates all affected people, especially those who are currently falling through the system. It raises broader questions about alternative dispute resolution, the need for reform to include more collective approaches, a stronger recognition of the needs of vulnerable people, and a stronger emphasis on delivering social justice. The authors use energy poverty as a site of vulnerability and examine the barriers to justice facing this excluded group. The book assembles the findings of an interdisciplinary research project studying access to justice and its barriers in the UK, Italy, France, Bulgaria and Spain (Catalonia). In-depth interviews with regulators, ombuds, energy companies, third-sector organisations and vulnerable people provide a rich dataset through which to understand the phenomenon. The book provides theoretical and empirical insights which shed new light on these issues and sets out new directions of inquiry for research, policy and practice. It will be of interest to researchers, students and policymakers working on access to justice, consumer vulnerability, energy poverty, and the complex intersection between these fields. The book includes contributions by Cosmo Graham (UK), Sarah Supino and Benedetta Voltaggio (Italy), Marine Cornelis (France), Anais Varo and Enric Bartlett (Catalonia) and Teodora Peneva (Bulgaria).

This book offers a unique look into prisons in Iran and the lives of the prisoners and their families. It provides an overview of the history of Iranian prisons, depicts the sub-culture in contemporary Iranian prisons, and highlights the forms that gender discrimination takes behind the prison walls. The book draws on the voices of 90 men and women who have been imprisoned in Iran, interviewed in 2012 and 2017 across various parts of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It presents a different approach to the one proposed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish because the author argues that Iran never experienced “the age of sobriety in punishment” and “a slackening of the hold on the body”. Whilst penal severity in Iran has reduced, its scope has now extended beyond prisoners to their families, regardless of their age and gender. In Iran, penalties still target the body but now also affect the bodies of the entire prisoner’s family. It is not just prisoners who suffer from the lack of food, clothes, spaces for sleeping, health services, legal services, safety, and threats of physical violence and abuse but also their families. The book highlights the costs of mothers’ incarceration for their children. It argues that as long as punishment remains the dominant discourse of the penal system, the minds and bodies of anyone related to incarcerated offenders will remain under tremendous strain. This unique book explores the nature of these systems in a deeply under-covered nation to expand understandings of prisons in the non-Western world.