The Special Clerical Court can defrock and disbar Islamic jurists, give sentences of imprisonment, corporal punishment, execution, etc.
The court functions independently of the regular Iranian judicial framework, with its own security and prison systems,[1] "generally secret and confidential" cases, proceedings and procedures,[2] and is accountable only to the Supreme Leader of Iran, (Ali Khamenei as of 2024).
[6] Crimes prosecuted were acts aimed against the consolidation of power under Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as those committed by "black sheep" who broke traditional rules and harmed "the image of the clergy", according to Radio Farda.
[note 1] Faced with disapproval of the unconstitutionality of the SCC, Khomeini sent a letter to the Majles of Iran in 1988, recommending that the special courts start operating within constitutional perimeters after the end of the Iran–Iraq War.
The cases and procedures before the SCC "are generally secret and confidential", so there is no official information about how many people the court has put on trial, what charges have been brought or sentences passed.
Over a twelve year period from 1988 to 2000, about 600 people were sentenced to death and executed, 2000 clergy were defrocked and another 4000 punished with prison sentences, fines or beatings[9] While this may seem to involve an unusually large number of offenders and punishments, the SCC chief justice Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Salimi stated in 2006 (to the effect) that about 2000 complaints are registered with the SCC per year.
The Human Rights Activist's News Agency of Iran (NRANA) complains that the court is not mentioned in the constitution, and has not been approved of by the Islamic Consultative Assembly.
[2] Eshkevari, (who was defrocked and served several years in prison after being convicted by the Court of “spreading lies and insulting Islamic sanctities” among other charges) states the SCC "contradicts the modern law system” and “is clearly" guilty of "discrimination against the justice".
Salam was founding in 1991 after a group of left-wing but "veteran revolutionary" pro-regime clerics, were not only banned by the conservative Guardian Council from running for the Assembly of Experts, but could find no newspaper even willing to print that news and their protest.
)[18] Prior to this ban, at least one of the clerics, Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, publisher of Salam, was convicted for defamation and spreading false information.
If the reason for being of the Guardian ruler is based on the principle of velāyat-e faqih, and dissident cleric theologians are exactly the people who could "prove the extent to which the velāyat-e faqih is inconsistent with Shiʿi traditions and the extent to which it is a theological novelty whose primary function is to justify the exercise of authoritarian rule";[21][note 6] then "it is not difficult to see how the SCC, given their legal status outside any accountable, transparent check by a governmental office other than the Office of the Supreme Leader, could transform into the Supreme Leaders’ primary instrument to discipline and prosecute dissident clerics.