The Influence of Populism in Iran’s Criminal Policy in Economic Crimes
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Abstract
Populism has been one of the influential factors affecting the formation of criminal policy of countries in
recent decades. Populism in the field of economic crimes finds opportunity to emerge in certain periods of
time, resort to symbolic aspects of confrontation repression in economic crime control policies has a great
deal of capacity to gain support of public opinion. Among the features of populism discourse in the realm
of economic crimes enhancing the powers of the authorities responsible for confronting economic crimes,
raising the level of public expectations of resorting to criminal instruments to solve the problem, making
the grounds for proposing the necessity of resorting to an exceptional criminal system and disregard for
fair trial, domination of journalistic literature on scientific discourses (crime magnification), emphasis on
description rather than analysis and focus on hardware indicators like the number of discovered crimes to
show the success rate and so on can be named. Measures and mechanisms used in our country for
confronting economic crimes indicates that criminal populism is an undeniable threat in confronting this
criminal phenomenon, whilst following up on populist criminal policies in economic crimes has caused
securityism to surpass economic considerations in many cases and caused crime and punishment in
principal criminal policy not to be consistent with fundamental principles such as principle of the legality
of crimes and punishments.