The Influence of Populism in Iran’s Criminal Policy in Economic Crimes

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 has a great deal of capacity to gain support of public opinion Among the features of populism discourse in the realm of 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 hardwar 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.