Iran Election Diary

Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani has been appointed by Iran's supreme leader as head of the judiciary to replace Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi, whose term ended on August 16.

Shahrudi took over as the head of the judiciary in 1999, when he called it a "ruined place." But what has he left to his successor?

Who Is Sadeq Larijani?

The 48-year-old Larijani was born in Najaf, Iraq, and has served two terms in the Assembly of Experts, a body of clerics with the constitutional authority to appoint, supervise, and even dismiss Iran's supreme leader. He was then a member of the Guardians Council, the 12-member supervisory body tasked with overseeing legislation and supervising elections.

His brother Ali Larijani is the speaker of parliament and another brother, Mohammad Javad Larijani, is an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the leader of the Islamic consultative assembly.

Sadeq Larijani is considered an ultraconservative and is close to the supreme leader.

He will face serious challenges in the ongoing crisis following the disputed presidential election, with the recent mass trials including a number of foreign citizens drawing attention to the efficiency of Iran's legal system.

"No judicial system can consider as valid a confession obtained as a result of harsh interrogations or under torture," Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, has said about the postelection trials in Iran.

The politicization of Iran's judicial system has been a key concern since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. A constant shifting among key positions in the three different branches of power is the biggest threat to the independency of judiciary.

Gholam Hussein Mohseni Ejei, a former intelligence minister, has been nominated as Larijani's deputy, and official reports say Abbas Ali Kadkhodai, the spokesman of the Guardians Council, will be the new spokesman for the judiciary.

It seems as long as the judiciary system is under the constant influence of the other branches of power, it will remain a "ruined place."

-- Mazyar Mokfi

Like so much of the media since Iran's biggest crisis since the Islamic revolution, this morning Reuters appeared of at least two minds on Iran's recent death toll in a story quoting Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi:


The certainty of that sentence seemed troublesome, particularly in light of the sentence that came two paragraphs later:


We initially added an editor's note to the Reuters item pointing out that opposition and other groups claim the death toll is higher.

And since then, Reuters has emerged with another story quoting an ally of opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi saying far more people have died in eight-plus weeks of violence, much of it apparently officially sanctioned. It says:


Iranian officials won the first round of that dissemination battle and the opposition the second, of course.

It's a cautionary example of the enormous obstacles to tracking down a grim figure that can be maddeningly elusive but lies at the very heart of the tragedy unfolding in Iran (and other areas in RFE/RL's broadcast region that are not supposed to be "conflict zones," including Russia -- and Chechnya in particular -- and Uzbekistan to name a couple).

Beyond the anguish of those who simply want to be reunited with friends and loved ones, the uncertainty is essential to the debate over the lengths that the Iranian government is willing to go to in order to quell a popular challenge to its legitimacy and methods.

As Golnaz Esfandiari's story yesterday made abundantly clear, there is no reliable death toll at this point despite the good-faith efforts of many. But as it also made clear, the story will not simply go away or be deflected by televised trials of dubious confessions.

-- Andy Heil