A Survey on the Right to Recall of the Elected Officials by People in Legal Systems

The right to recall of the elected officials by people means the right of people to remove the elected officials from office before the end of their term that has gained the attention of some legal-political systems as a procedure based on direct democracy. The difficulty of harmonization of the recall mechanism with effective institutions of indirect democracy is one of the reasons because of which this mechanism is not as widely used as other direct democracy’s tools. But this difficulty should not prevent it from being logically and reasonably used for the realization of increasing participation of the citizens. It would be determined in this comparative study that different countries have incorporated this process, either in a mixed way or fully, in their laws. But, in Iran, among the direct democracy practices, there is no explicit sign of it. Nevertheless, it seems possible to deduce the principle of acceptance of the mechanism's legitimacy from the accepted principles of Islam and the legal system regarding the nature of representation, as well as democratic interpretations of some constitutional principles. In order to expand the direct participation of people in governance, we can apply the mechanism in the legal system by using its successful experience of usage in other countries; provided that this application entails sufficient procedural guarantees to ensure the transparency, legitimacy, and legality of the recall process.