The Cultural Policymaking Process in the Iranian Criminalization System

Cultural policy-making is an important part of the public policy-making process and seeks to recognize and promote culture at the community level. Accordingly, cultural policymakers seek to develop cultural fundamentals through conductive guidance and mandatory legal policies. Although the legal effects of cultural policymaking interact with different legal domains, employing criminal law and the criminalization system to help adopt cultural policies is the most important method in which to make law-based cultural policies. This is because, via the suppressive means of punishment, criminal law can affect life, property, liberty and reputation. For this reason, this study seeks to explain the process of cultural policy-making in the Iranian criminal system.According to the findings of this study, the ideal premise is to adhere to cultural rights so that in the realm of cultural norms, the principle of minimum criminal intervention and, in the case of attacks on minority groups, the principle of maximum criminal intervention is taken into account. In the Iranian penal system, the criminalization of some subcultures belonging to minority groups conflicts with various cultural rights and the principles of cultural pluralism. On the other hand, the fact that some offensive behaviors towards minority groups are not criminalized within the framework of backward policies shows yet another aspect of the failure of the Iranian penal system in this area. In conclusion, it seems that the centralized political system, the existence of epistemic attitudes, paternalism attitudes and the hegemony of conservative attitudes, are the most important causes for the lack of attention to culture in Iranian criminal policies.