Document Type : Research/Original/Regular Article
Authors
Abstract
By the Iranian Constitution, justice courts are considered to be the public authorities to deal with people’s complaints. Alongside these public authorities, the Administrative Justice Court (AJC) has been developed with the aim of “getting people’s right from the government” and “establishment of administrative justice”. Referring to the principles of the Constitution, one can to some extent make jurisdictional distinctions between the justice courts and the AJC. However, in the Iranian judicial procedure, which has a more precise look at the issue of jurisdiction, and explains the distinctions in a technical manner, the issued decisions indicate that regarding the jurisdiction of the AJC there is not a united procedure, and this disunity applies both to the AJC and public courts. The first question to be raised is whether all claims concerning the government’s civil responsibility should be made before the AJC, or in all cases in which the losers intend to demand compensation from the governmental institutions they first should refer to the AJC in order to ascertain the transgression; or in some cases they can directly make their claims before the public court. Abstracting the cases in which the conditions of the responsibility of the government are met, this study tries to discuss the above questions on the basis of the examination of judicial decisions. Finally, it comes to the conclusion that the general jurisdiction of public justice courts over all civil and criminal claims requires that the jurisdiction of the Administrative Justice Court should be interpreted according to the existing laws and in accordance with the philosophy of the formation of the AJC. Therefore, not all claims could be made before the AJC, and the individual claims for compensation against administration must be interpreted with respect to the nature of the claims, the position of the specific governmental office or department in relation to that of the individual, and the type of the administrative action.
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