Legal Foundations of the Prosecutor’s Mandate and Priority Areas of Action Across Different Domains of Public Rights

Abstract

Public rights encompass collective, diffuse, and intergenerational interests whose protection cannot always be achieved through individual litigation or ordinary administrative mechanisms. In the Iranian legal system, the prosecutor occupies a central position in safeguarding these rights because the office represents the public interest, initiates public prosecution, supervises criminal investigations, and may intervene when serious violations affect society as a whole. This article examines the legal foundations, forms, limits, and priority domains of the prosecutor’s mandate in protecting public rights. Using a descriptive-analytical legal method, the study analyzes constitutional principles, criminal-procedure rules, sector-specific legislation, judicial directives, and relevant legal scholarship. The findings indicate that the prosecutor’s mandate is grounded in a layered legal framework consisting of the Judiciary’s constitutional responsibility to revive public rights, procedural powers relating to public prosecution, substantive criminal provisions, and specialized laws governing public health, economic order, natural resources, environmental protection, public infrastructure, and cyberspace. Prosecutorial intervention may take preventive, criminal, civil, administrative, and restorative forms. However, the exercise of these powers must remain subject to legality, competence, necessity, proportionality, due process, institutional separation, transparency, and respect for individual freedoms. The principal priority areas include economic welfare and market integrity, food and medicine safety, water and energy security, protection of public infrastructure, environmental preservation, natural resources and public lands, and collective interests in the digital environment. The article further argues that prosecutorial priorities should be determined according to the scale, severity, immediacy, irreversibility, and systemic character of harm, as well as the vulnerability of affected populations and the failure of administrative authorities to respond effectively. It concludes that effective protection of public rights requires clearer legislation, specialized prosecutorial units, interdisciplinary expertise, structured interagency coordination, transparent decision-making, and greater participation by civil-society and professional organizations.