Introduction: Two Complementary Movements in the Language of Power

In the official discourse of the Islamic Republic, “norm-breaking” appears to be a simple term used to describe deviation from accepted social rules. But this sociological appearance conceals its political and criminal function. In part of the political discourse of recent years, the central instance of norm-breaking emerges when criticism moves beyond evaluating a decision or performance and approaches the symbolic sanctity of the Leader, the legitimacy of his position, or the foundations of the system’s authority. At the same time, criminal laws provide specific offenses for insulting the founder of the Islamic Republic and the Leader, insulting officials, propaganda activity against the system, and other speech-related crimes. So why does the official apparatus, before entering the language of law, use an ambiguous, moral, and ostensibly social term?

The answer offered by this article rests on a duality. At the political level, labeling operates narrowly and concealingly: a dispute over legitimacy, the limits of criticism, and the Leader’s accountability is reduced through the term “norm-breaking” to conduct contrary to public decorum. This term diminishes the political content of protest and presents official authority as equivalent to society’s norm. At the judicial level, the direction of movement is reversed. The same conduct can fall under a network of criminal charges: insult, propaganda against the system, dissemination of falsehoods, disturbing public opinion, disruption of public order, offenses against public decency, or trade and media violations. At this stage, we are not dealing with semantic reduction, but with the possibility of expansion and selection. In public discourse, the government avoids explicitly referring to a political crime, but within the judicial apparatus it benefits from the breadth of available charges.

These two movements are not incompatible with each other. The first places the actor, even before judicial proceedings, in a morally illegitimate position and raises the cost of publicly defending them. The second converts that political and moral judgment into legal effect. In other words, “norm-breaking” is not itself a crime, but rather a pre-criminal label: a classification that does not yet follow the precise requirements of the principle of legality, but facilitates the subsequent selection of a legal charge.

The same logic can be observed in the recent wave of actions against social media pages, cafés, tourism tours, and businesses. HRANA’s report on events between July 11 and August 1, 2026 (20 Tir to 10 Mordad 1405), alongside legal or quasi-legal terms, records the repeated use of expressions such as “norm-breaking,” “culturally harmful content,” “contrary to public decency,” “failure to observe Islamic proprieties,” and “society’s psychological security.” (1) Political and cultural instances are not identical, but both make use of the same technology of governance: power first defines the norm, morally condemns departure from it, and then, if necessary, selects the appropriate criminal charge.

Norm-Breaking Is Not a Crime; Its Instance May Be a Crime

In criminal law, the discussion must begin with the principle of legality. Article 36 of the Constitution stipulates that sentencing and punishment are possible only through a competent court and pursuant to law. Article 2 of the Islamic Penal Code defines a crime as an act or omission for which the law has prescribed punishment, and Article 12 once again binds the issuance and execution of criminal judgments to law and a competent authority. This framework is not merely a technical rule; it is a division of power among the legislature, the judge, and law enforcement officers. The legislature must define prohibited conduct in advance, the judge must only apply that rule to the specific case, and law enforcement officers have no right to create a new crime through administrative or policing language.

On this basis, “norm-breaking” is not an independent criminal offense. The term may be used in a political statement, police report, religious speech, or everyday judgment, but unless a particular conduct matches the elements of a legally defined crime, it cannot create criminal liability. The adjective “norm-breaking” cannot substitute for the legal element of an offense, just as “immoral,” “inappropriate,” “unbecoming,” or “harmful” are not in themselves criminal charges.

However, this proposition should not lead to immunity for all conduct described as norm-breaking. A behavior may be regarded as norm-breaking in a social assessment and at the same time satisfy the elements of a crime defined by law. Article 514 of Book Five of the Islamic Penal Code criminalizes insulting the founder of the Islamic Republic and the Leader; Article 609 addresses insulting certain officials and public employees; Article 500 penalizes propaganda activity against the system; Article 638 deals with certain public conduct related to public decency; and Article 698, under specified conditions, criminalizes making false statements or attributing untrue acts with the intent to cause harm or disturb public opinion. Depending on its nature, intent, audience, and context, the same conduct may fall under one of these provisions. But in every case, the reason for punishment is the legal charge itself, not norm-breaking.

This distinction is especially important in political cases. Harsh criticism of the Leader, attributing incompetence to him, questioning the legitimacy of his office, and using derogatory language may appear politically close to one another, but they are not the same in criminal law. Article 514 speaks of “insult,” not criticism, opposition, demands for resignation, or denial of legitimacy. The 2000 (1379) Interpretive Law links insult and affront to the use of explicit or apparent words, or conduct and gestures that, considering custom, time, place, and the position of the persons involved, cause belittlement and humiliation; it further states that where such appearance is absent, insult is not established. Therefore, not every unpleasant statement about the Leader can be connected to Article 514 without establishing its humiliating character.

The same consideration applies to Article 500. The law refers to “propaganda activity” against the system. If a single piece of writing, an academic analysis, criticism of performance, or expression of dissatisfaction is brought under this article without examining the concept of activity, its propagandistic direction, and its subject, the criminal charge has gone beyond the text of the law. The phrase “by any means” does not allow a judge to treat every form of expression as propaganda activity; it generalizes only the means and method of the activity, not the nature or direction of the activity itself.

The Principle of Strict Interpretation and the Danger of Secondary Criminalization

The principle of legality remains incomplete without strict interpretation. A law may have been written in advance, but if a judge can freely expand its scope, the actual prohibition is not created when the law is enacted but when the judgment is issued. Strict interpretation does not mean that a judge merely repeats the literal meaning of words or refrains from considering context and custom. It means that interpretation must not create a new prohibition, attach similar behavior to a crime by analogy, or resolve statutory ambiguity to the detriment of the accused.

In Iranian legal literature, strict interpretation is regarded as a consequence of the principle of legality, the presumption of innocence, the principle that punishment without prior notification is reprehensible, and the principle of permissibility. When there is doubt as to whether a criminal charge applies to conduct, punitive power should be limited rather than expanded through speculation about legislative intent or political expediency. (2) Of course, strict interpretation and interpretation in favor of the accused are not always synonymous; sometimes a broad interpretation of a lenient rule benefits the accused. But in determining criminality, the judge has no right to bring into the realm of punishment an act that the legislature has not clearly criminalized through expansive interpretation. (3)

The problem in political criminal law is that many charges are constructed from evaluative and context-dependent terms: insult, propaganda, disturbance, public decency, sacred values, order, security. These terms cannot be applied without interpretation. But their dependence on interpretation does not create unlimited discretion. Custom must be a means of discovering a meaning that the term can bear within the structure of the law, not a channel through which the judge’s personal values, institutional expectations, or security considerations enter.

Research on customary interpretation of criminal law shows that even where the principle of strict interpretation is accepted in theory, judges may rely, when applying charges to cases, on personal understandings, institutional culture, or their limited conception of custom, producing inconsistent outcomes. In such a situation, “secondary criminalization” occurs at the stage of adjudication: the legislature has created a general offense, but its actual scope is determined by a body of judicial decisions. (4) The less judgments are published and the less judicial reasoning is exposed to academic criticism, the more hidden this stage becomes and the more difficult it is to control.

The statement that “it is as though all criminal charges are at the disposal of judges to interpret and apply in whatever shape and form they wish” must be understood within this framework. In legal terms, the judge does not own criminal charges; but the density of provisions, ambiguity of terms, overlap among offenses, and weak requirements for providing transparent reasoning can produce a similar effect. The prosecuting authority first identifies the undesirable conduct or person and then selects from among existing offenses the most suitable legal form. The proper relationship should be the reverse: first the law and the elements of the offense, then an impartial examination of whether the accused’s conduct matches them.

Why Is “Insulting the Leader” Translated Into “Norm-Breaking”?

There is no gap in criminal law when it comes to protecting the Leader through penal sanctions. Article 514 is explicit, and the Interpretive Law also provides criteria for the meaning of insult. Therefore, the political use of “norm-breaking” should not be understood as a solution to the absence of a legal charge. This linguistic choice concerns legitimacy and the representation of political conflict.

When a citizen or activist insults the Leader, the government may invoke Article 514. But when speech goes beyond explicit insult and targets the Leader’s position, his moral competence, his responsibility for crises, or the very legitimacy of velayat-e faqih, framing the case becomes more difficult. Criticizing legitimacy is not necessarily insult; opposition to the system is not necessarily propaganda activity. If the official apparatus, instead of entering into these distinctions, calls the act “norm-breaking,” it accomplishes several things at once.

First, it removes criticism from the realm of argument. The critic’s question may be on what basis the Leader is legitimate, what responsibility he bears for policy failures, or why he is shielded from effective oversight. The label of norm-breaking does not answer the substance of these questions; it presents the very act of raising them as conduct outside collective decorum. Second, it erases the boundary between the person of the Leader and society’s norm. Insulting or opposing him is treated not as an offense against an officeholder, but as breaking the order on which society is said to rest. Third, it distances the government from acknowledging the political nature of the prosecution. Action against an “opponent of legitimacy” may appear to signal a political crisis; action against a “norm-breaker” can be presented as a defense of public peace and morality.

This shift becomes more useful under conditions of a crisis of effectiveness and declining public trust. A government with substantial symbolic capital can treat fundamental criticism as marginal or ineffective. When legitimacy is contested, repeated official use of the charge “insulting the Leader” may unintentionally reveal that the Leader’s position has become a subject of everyday dispute. The language of norms conceals the conflict: the problem is presented not as weakening political obedience, but as the immorality of a limited group.

In the Leader’s official statements as well, acceptable protest is distinguished from norm-breaking; a Basij member or citizen may be dissatisfied, but should not express that dissatisfaction in a way that “shares a common denominator with the enemy.” (5) This formula defines the boundary of legitimate protest not only through the manner of expression but also through its relationship to the political order and the enemy. As a result, the political norm is more than conversational decorum: it is loyalty to the fundamental distinctions that power establishes between insiders and outsiders.

The Double Standard in Labeling and Applying the Law

The duality under discussion should not be understood merely as a conflict between one moral term and several legal provisions. We are dealing with two standards for describing and evaluating conduct. The first operates politically in favor of power: oppositional speech is stripped of its political content and reduced to rudeness, extremism, or deviation from the norm. The second operates judicially, again in favor of power: the same speech may, through broad interpretation, be placed under several criminal offenses.

There is also a risk of a double standard in enforcement. Harsh, humiliating, or accusatory expressions, when used by people aligned with the government against opponents, may be understood as defense of values, revolutionary reaction, or political commentary; but similar speech directed against an official is more readily transformed into insult, dissemination of falsehoods, or disturbance of public opinion. Statistically proving such discrimination requires a comparative study of cases, and no conclusion should be drawn about all cases without data. Nevertheless, the legal structure itself creates the conditions for it: special offenses protecting officials, broad prosecutorial powers, and evaluative concepts that bring the relationship between speech and power into the determination of criminality.

This issue is evident in Article 609. Insulting ordinary persons and insulting certain officials do not receive the same level of criminal protection; official status intensifies protection. Justifications may be offered for preserving the functional authority of public institutions, but special protection becomes problematic when the boundary between criticism and insult is interpreted broadly. A political official, because of their greater authority, should tolerate more criticism, not have every harsh statement about their performance transformed by virtue of their office into a more serious crime.

The double standard here lies not only in the severity of punishment but in the starting point of interpretation. With oppositional speech, the authority may begin with the assumption that there was an intent to undermine, disturb, or propagandize, and then read the evidence in light of that assumption. With aligned speech, the same intensity of language may be interpreted within a political, emotional, or defensive context. The presumption of innocence requires reversing this path: criminal intent must be proven, and ambiguity must be resolved not according to the speaker’s political position but in favor of freedom.

The importance of the personal analysis offered in this article lies precisely here. The main issue is not simply that the government has imported a social concept into law. The government applies different rules at two stages: to introduce the case, it makes the language vague and moral so that the political nature of prosecution remains unseen; to impose punishment, it makes the law flexible and the offenses expandable so that undesirable behavior does not escape the reach of the judiciary. The result is a kind of division of labor: politics avoids responsibility for explicit labeling, while the judiciary bears the burden of determining the legal charge.

The Right to Criticize Public Officials and Greater Criminal Tolerance

In democratic criminal law, a public official, because of their role and authority, should tolerate more political criticism than an ordinary citizen. This rule does not mean that abusive language is permissible or that individuals are deprived entirely of protection for their dignity; its basis is the necessity of public oversight of power. The greater the effect an official’s decisions have on collective life, the broader the range of tolerable speech concerning their performance, competence, and responsibility should be. If special criminal protection is applied without such balancing, it changes from protecting the function of an institution into immunizing the person in power.

In a system where the Leader enjoys extensive authority, criticism of him can necessarily be structural and fundamental. Criticizing an individual decision is not the same as questioning mechanisms of accountability, the legitimacy of the office, or ultimate responsibility for crises; but the radical nature of the question does not create the material element of insult. The judge must distinguish between a statement about an official, a judgment about performance, and a humiliating expression. If every doubt about legitimacy becomes an “attack on the Leader” and every attack on the Leader becomes insult, Article 514 will be transformed from an offense protecting dignity into a criminal shield for the political order.

The same applies to propaganda against the system. Political freedom is not merely the right to praise or seek minor reforms; it must also include the possibility of opposing the structure, demanding constitutional change, and rejecting the official theory of legitimacy, unless the conduct is accompanied by the clear elements of an independent crime. Broad interpretation of security offenses blurs the boundary between protecting security and protecting political monopoly, and moves the court from being an institution applying law toward becoming a judge of political loyalty.

Norm-Breaking as a Pre-Criminal Label

From the perspective of the sociology of law, “norm-breaking” can be described as a pre-criminal label. This does not mean a charge found in criminal law, but rather a category that prepares behavior for official intervention before a crime has been proven. At this stage, the court has not yet established the elements of an offense, but the individual has symbolically been placed on the opposite side of society.

Labeling theory reminds us that deviance is not merely a characteristic of an act; it is also the result of rules, the selection of enforcers, and social reaction. Becker writes that social groups create deviance by making rules and applying them, turning those who violate the rules into “outsiders.” (6) The state occupies a privileged position in this process because it combines the power of naming with the power of coercion. When the police, prosecutor, or official media call someone a norm-breaker, that label can become the prelude to a warning, content removal, a pledge, closure, summons, and a criminal case.

The pre-criminal label has three functions. First, it shifts the burden of proof in public opinion. Instead of the state explaining what specific crime occurred, the person must prove that their behavior was not anti-social. Second, it keeps the boundaries of intervention fluid. A legal offense has a scope, however ambiguous, but “norm-breaking” can move, depending on the issue of the day, from politics to clothing, art, sports, or business. Third, it enables the retrospective selection of a legal charge. Once the undesirable behavior has been identified, the apparatus can choose the appropriate route from among a trade violation, a security charge, a speech offense, or public morality regulations.

This mechanism should not be equated with formal criminalization. Formal criminalization is the act of the legislature. But in secondary criminalization or practical criminalization, the police, prosecutor, judge, administrative body, and media all play a role in determining who actually enters the criminal sphere. The law may not have changed, but enforcement patterns may target new groups and expose conduct that was previously tolerated to official reaction.

Foucault did not see modern penal power as residing solely in court judgments; discipline operates through the regulation of space, bodies, time, and everyday behavior. (7) In contemporary Iran as well, the effect of a pledge, forced removal of content, or short-term closure does not fall only on the person directly concerned. Its message is transmitted to other business owners and users and pushes them to anticipate the preferences of the institution and engage in self-censorship. The ambiguity of the term norm-breaking expands this effect because citizens do not know precisely which next act will cross the line.

Two Spheres of Application: Politics and Lifestyle

The political use of the term should be distinguished from its cultural and policing use. In the political sphere, the core issue often concerns the symbolic sanctity of the Leader, the legitimacy of the system, and the boundaries of protest. In the cultural sphere, the term refers to hijab, women’s presence in public space, music, dancing, advertising, cafés, tourism tours, and social media content. Treating these instances as identical erases their legal differences. Nevertheless, the mode of governance is similar in both areas: the official norm is substituted for society’s contested norm, and departure from it is then turned into an object of intervention through moral language.

HRANA’s report covering July 11 to August 1, 2026 (20 Tir to 10 Mordad 1405) speaks of at least 72 identifiable pages or accounts being blocked or seized, 21 pages being required to publish pledges, and 23 business establishments being sealed, while emphasizing that the figures overlap in some cases and that their total does not represent the number of independent cases. In addition, Qazvin’s Public Places Supervision Police announced the “cleansing” of 56 pages containing “norm-breaking and culturally harmful advertising content,” while in Rasht the removal of more than 3,000 pieces of content from the pages of 32 business establishments was reported. (1)

In official notices, the term norm-breaking appears alongside concepts that do not share the same legal status: “contrary to public decency,” “failure to observe Islamic proprieties,” “criminal activity,” “content contrary to morality and public decency,” “cultural harm,” and “society’s psychological security.” The coexistence of these languages is more important than the number of cases. A social term, a moral judgment, a security claim, and a legal charge are placed in one package, even though each should have a different basis, authority, and effect.

Sealing a café because of “the occurrence of social abnormalities” or blocking a page because of “norm-breaking content” still does not tell us exactly which legal obligation was violated. There may be legal grounds and evidence in the case files; limited public access does not permit a definitive judgment about every case. But this very gap between emphatic moral language and limited legal explanation is part of the problem. The citizen learns the result, not the reasoning that should connect that result to the text of the law.

Requiring users to publish pledges is also a clear example of the pre-criminal label. A pledge may be published without a final conviction, but before the audience it presents the person as someone who committed a violation and promised not to repeat it. Here, the law enforcement response does not merely address the past; it regulates the future behavior of the person and others. Closure, in addition to its direct economic effect, also sends a message to the surrounding environment that the person responsible for the business must enforce not only the law but also the norm expected by the institution upon customers.

From a Crisis of Legitimacy to the Moralization of Political Conflict

Emphasizing a crisis of legitimacy should not become a claim that requires no evidence. Legitimacy is a multidimensional concept and cannot be fully measured by a single survey or a single protest wave. Nevertheless, when a political system faces declining trust, dissatisfaction with effectiveness, and protests over the lack of accountability of senior institutions, the way opponents are labeled becomes more important. The government must explain whether opposition to the Leader is a political error, a civil right, a personal insult, or a threat against the system.

“Norm-breaking” postpones this difficult choice. The term is negative enough to justify intervention and vague enough to avoid forcing the government to precisely define the offense. Moreover, it transforms a vertical conflict between citizen and power into a horizontal conflict between the individual and society. The state does not say that the person has challenged political authority; it says that the person has broken the norms of the people. In this narrative, the government is not a party to the dispute, but the arbiter and defender of society.

This moralization also removes the opponent from the position of political actor. Their argument about corruption, inefficiency, the Leader’s responsibility, or the absence of public consent is no longer the subject of discussion. Attention shifts to manner of expression, tone, sanctity, and moral harm. Some speech may indeed consist of abuse and lack political value; the law also provides standards for insult. But even in such a case, the judge must prove insult. The use of a general label should not allow criticism and abuse, opposition and dissemination of falsehoods, or questioning legitimacy and propaganda activity to be merged into one another.

Sociologically, this method is an attempt to preserve a monopoly over the definition of political reality. Power does not merely decide whether an act is permitted or prohibited; it determines what the act means. A critic’s statement may be called protest, criticism, insult, propaganda, or norm-breaking. Each label creates a different path for public opinion and the judicial apparatus. Whenever official labeling implies criminal meaning before adjudication, the presumption of innocence is damaged at the social level, even if it remains formally valid in law.

Is Every Use of “Norm-Breaking” a Political Tactic?

For the sake of precision, overgeneralization must be avoided. Not every official who uses the term norm-breaking is necessarily consciously attempting to circumvent the principle of legality. The term has become common in formal Persian and may be used in the general sense of behavior contrary to custom. Nor are all reported measures necessarily without a legal basis. In a given case, conduct may correspond to Article 638, trade regulations, or other rules, and the public notice may merely offer an incomplete summary of the basis for the decision.

But analyzing function does not require proving the intent of every actor. Even if the term is used out of administrative habit, its effects remain: it blurs the boundary between morality and crime, marginalizes precise explanation of the legal basis, and places the individual in the position of a deviant before trial. In public law, assessing the structural consequences of a practice is more important than discovering the psychological motives of every officer.

Nor should the existence of social norms be denied. A society without norms is impossible, and the law sometimes protects society’s fundamental values. The question is not whether the state may ever protect public morality; the question is through what tools and within what limits. Criminal law should be the last and most precise tool, not the first response to a value-based disagreement. The harm principle, necessity, proportionality, and penal minimalism require that moral condemnation be converted into punishment only where there is significant harm and a clear legal text.

For this reason, the proper response to the government’s claim is not simply that “the conduct in question is not norm-breaking for the majority of society.” Even if the majority considers it objectionable, no automatic criminal consequence follows. Individual rights and freedoms matter precisely so that majority morality is not directly transformed into punishment of a minority. On the other hand, any claim that the official norm does not correspond to society must be supported by empirical data, not by the assumption that whatever the government says must necessarily contradict the majority’s view.

Requirements of a Law-Governed Criminal Approach

If the principle of legality is to have practical meaning in this field, several requirements must govern all stages. First, the official authority must from the outset state the precise legal charge and the attributed material conduct. Phrases such as norm-breaking, contrary to propriety, or cultural harm cannot substitute for a legal provision. Second, there must be a clear distinction between administrative action, a trade violation, a preventive order, and criminal punishment. Closure or blocking, even if technically not called punishment, are severe restrictions, and their basis, duration, issuing authority, and avenue of appeal must be known.

Third, the elements of speech-related offenses must be established separately and not on the basis of the general atmosphere of the case. In insult, there must be a customary appearance of humiliation; in dissemination of falsehoods, the falsity of the statement and the specified particular intent; in propaganda activity, the existence and direction of the activity; and in offenses against public decency, the precise conditions of publicity and conformity with the statutory text must be examined. Conduct should not be moved from one charge to another merely because it is politically undesirable until one of them eventually fits.

Fourth, strict interpretation must be visible in the judgment. The judge must explain why the chosen meaning does not go beyond the limits of the statutory term, why a competing interpretation was rejected, and how doubt was not resolved to the detriment of the accused. Publishing important judgments and allowing them to be criticized by universities and bar associations can help prevent a judge’s personal conception of custom from becoming legal custom.

Fifth, the standard of law enforcement must be independent of the speaker’s political relationship with power. If a certain expression or conduct is, by custom, insulting, criminal protection should not be activated only for officials or people aligned with the government; and if harsh criticism of an official is not a crime, the speaker’s political opposition should not turn it into one. Equality before the law is not merely equality in the text of punishment; it is also equality at the starting point of interpretation and in the degree of tolerance for criticism.

Finally, the public language of institutions should avoid issuing moral judgments before adjudication. An official authority may announce that a case has been opened or that a specific accusation is being investigated; but describing a person as a norm-breaker, criminal, or disruptor of psychological security before judgment places social condemnation ahead of legal adjudication. In political and speech-related offenses, this prejudgment is especially dangerous because the meaning and intent of the speech itself are disputed.

Conclusion: The Law Should Not Be a Garment Tailored After the Defendant Has Been Chosen

The basic legal answer does not change: norm-breaking is not a crime; its instance may be a crime. If conduct corresponds to Article 514, 500, 609, 638, 698, or any other statutory provision, the prosecuting authority must state that charge, its elements, and the evidence. If there is no such correspondence, the moral weight of the term norm-breaking cannot create criminal liability.

But the analysis does not stop at this technical answer. The choice of the term “norm-breaking” in politics, especially when confronting attacks on the symbolic sanctity of the Leader or questioning his legitimacy, has a concealing function. A political dispute is translated into social deviance; the government moves from the position of a party to the dispute into that of representative of the public norm; and the opponent is presented, even before entering court, as someone outside the moral order.

On the other side, the judicial apparatus does not suffer from a shortage of charges. The problem is the possibility of expanding and combining them. If strict interpretation, the presumption of innocence, and the requirement of clear reasoning are not seriously enforced, the legal charge can be selected after undesirable conduct has been identified. What should be an advance limit on power becomes a garment tailored to fit the defendant after they have been chosen.

This is the double standard that forms the backbone of the argument: in politics, the precise name of the offense is set aside so that prosecution appears moral and non-political; in the judiciary, the scope of offenses is expanded so that undesirable behavior does not remain beyond the reach of punishment. The first stage constructs the legitimacy of prosecution in public opinion; the second produces its binding legal effect.

The expansion of the term from politics to hijab, cafés, Instagram pages, and businesses shows that the issue is not limited to criminal protection of the person of the Leader. At a broader level, we are dealing with a model of governance that makes the official norm a precondition for legal intervention. The state first determines what is normal and proper; then labels departure from it; and finally, relying on the administrative and judicial apparatus, creates consequences for it.

The rule of law must break this chain. Law is not an extension of the state’s moral judgment, but its limit. The judge is not a translator of political will into criminal language, but the guardian of the distance between objectionable conduct and crime. Wherever this distance disappears, the issue is no longer merely the misuse of a word; the structure of criminal responsibility itself has changed. Crime must be defined by law before the conduct occurs, not by power after it has found its opponent or norm-breaker.

Footnotes:

1- From Blocking Pages to Sealing Cafés: A New Wave of Pressure on Cyberspace and the Public Sphere, HRANA News Agency, August 1, 2026 (10 Mordad 1405).

2- Rezaei, Fatemeh and Mohammad-Hassan Haeri, Deriving the Strict Interpretation of Criminal Laws from Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Studies in Islamic Jurisprudence and Foundations of Law, 2020 (1399).

3- Mohammadi, Rouhollah; Mohammad-Javad Bagherizadeh and Behnam Yousefian, The Principle of Interpretation in Favor of the Accused in Criminal Law, Comparative Criminal Jurisprudence Quarterly, 2021 (1400), Vol. 1, No. 3.

4- Moezzanzadegan, Hassan-Ali and Atiyeh Parsaeian, The Role of Public Consultative Institutions in the Customary Interpretation of Criminal Law, Judicial Legal Perspectives, 2026 (1405), Vol. 31, No. 113.

5- Khamenei, Seyed Ali, Remarks in a Meeting with Thousands of Basij Members, November 29, 2023 (8 Azar 1402).

6- Becker, Howard. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. 1963, New York: Free Press.

7- Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975, Paris: Gallimard.