Journal of history of Iran)

Document Type : review paper

Abstract

Once the National Consultative Assembly of Iran was established and the representatives started making decisions on making new laws at the national level، some elites among the parliamentarians felt the need that the MPs should be placed into specialized working groups، called commissions. Commissions were among the major administrative organs of the First Consultative Assembly thus formed to review and examine the bills before they were presented on the floor of the parliament، hence they would provide for the final approval or rejection of the bills through legal and legislative procedures. For this purpose، there were two major factors which could have a deterrent role on the commission’s functions: one was the fact that due to their being far away from the capital or as a result of their intention to impose deliberate disruption in the parliament’s procedures، the anti-consultative rulers would reach the parliaments far too late and only near the end of the First National Consultative Assembly، hence the number of MPs present in certain commissions would not reach the quorum، and the commissions would face a lack of enough expertise. The second factor was the short life of the First National Consultative Assembly and the political، social، economic and cultural problems of the then parliament members. This study aims to investigate the knowledge and expertise of the MPs and the role of this factor on the commissions’ function، given the chaos ruling the circumstances surrounding the First National Consultative Assembly. Based on the analytic methodology in this historical research، findings of the present paper indicate that most of the problems persisted as a result of MPs’ lack of enough knowledge and their little awareness of the issues discussed in commissions، which by itself ended in other problems mainly the waste of time، the slow process of investigating the topics put forward and the delay in the codification of the legislative laws.
 

 

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