The Antidote That Arrived After Sohrab’s Death!*

In 2022, along with a group of friends, we filed a petition with the Court of Administrative Justice, arguing that the "Executive Procedure of the Disciplinary Regulations for Students" had serious legal and Sharia (Islamic law) flaws.

The review process for this case took three full calendar years due to jurisprudential inquiries and administrative procedures. The interesting and thought-provoking part of the story is that the process took so long that, in the meantime, the Ministries of Science and Health took the initiative themselves and replaced the disputed regulation with a new procedure (approved in 2024)!

In other words, the annulment ruling for certain articles reached us when the original regulation no longer existed and had already been repealed.

Nevertheless, the issuance of this judgment—albeit late—is highly valuable. Relying on the opinion of the Guardian Council's jurists, the Court of Administrative Justice established two key principles as Sharia foundations that stand firm even if the bylaws change, effectively preventing the repetition of wrongful practices in the future:

Prohibition of Arbitrary Notification to Families: The Court ruled that contacting a student's family or spouse to inform them of an infraction based merely on the "discretion" of the disciplinary committee is impermissible. If it contradicts Sharia standards (which mandate protecting a person's reputation and honor), it is null and void.

Privacy and Prohibition of Surveillance: The absolute nature of the article that allowed the committee to spy into the private lives of students (including in cyberspace) was declared contrary to Sharia and annulled.

We are glad that despite the change in the procedure, these legal and Sharia benchmarks have been permanently recorded in our legal system.

On a humorous note, since the legal office of the Ministry of Science made a spelling error on a basic legal term in their defense brief (misspelling the Persian equivalent of "False Analogy"), the Court should have annulled one point from the author's elementary school spelling grade! (Page 7 of the Judgment).

* Note: "The antidote that arrived after Sohrab's death" is a famous Persian proverb originating from Ferdowsi's epic poem, the Shahnameh. It refers to a remedy or help that arrives too late to be of any use, similar to the English expressions "too little, too late" or "closing the stable door after the horse has bolted."