Iran’s Legislative Criminal Policy Toward Genetic Damages: A Comparative Study with French Law

Abstract

Iran’s legislative criminal policy regarding damages resulting from genetic actions has, over the past two decades, required reconsideration and modernization under the influence of rapid advances in the biological sciences. In Iran, existing regulations are mainly found within medical laws, bioethical guidelines, and certain scattered criminal provisions. However, a coherent and comprehensive system for prevention, liability determination, and criminal response to genetic harm has yet to be established. This research, adopting a descriptive analytical approach and a comparative study of French law, seeks to analyze the legislative frameworks of both systems and assess their effectiveness in addressing risks arising from genomic interventions. In French law, through the enactment of the Bioethics Law and its periodic revisions, the scope of criminal and civil liability in genetic matters has been more precisely defined. Genomic interventions, prohibited manipulations, protection of human dignity, and related criminal sanctions are explicitly regulated. Comparative analysis shows that Iran’s criminal policy largely rests on general legal principles and broad criminal norms. Consequently, it faces significant gaps in coping with emerging technologies such as genome editing, advanced IVF, or the storage and dissemination of genetic data. The findings indicate that for Iran to establish an effective criminal policy framework, it must move toward enacting a comprehensive bioethics law, clearly delineate the responsibilities of researchers and medical institutions, criminalize specific high risk genetic behaviors, and create a specialized supervisory system. Such measures would safeguard citizens’ dignity and health while enabling the legitimate development of genetic technologies.