The nature and place of legal Axioms and their applications in Iranian criminal law

The General Axioms are among the most important and reliable sources in branch of any human knowledge, including legal understanding. These could serve interpreters as roadmaps. Criminal law is not an exception. The axioms in criminal law systems are a collection of benchmarks by which to interpret rules and regulations. In some fields, such as international law, making use of legal axioms is more common due to the lack of relevant rules and systematized regulations. These could be considered as extra judicial concepts handed down to us from the previous generations, so much so that today they are regarded as legal axioms without ever being required to be demonstrated as such. While systematizing rules and regulations law makers are expected to take such axioms as binding. Despite this legal axioms as main sources of legislature are not relied on as they should be in criminal cases; axioms which are of universal value for international community. The present research article, intends to answer a number of questions such as nature of axioms, their referents, their differences with concepts such as common sense, ethical procedures, their position in legal hierarchy, their use in legal prosecution, etc. methodologically, the paper follows a theoretical descriptive – analytical approach with a focus on library resources.