The 18th session of the Assembly of Experts has been held in the former building of the Parliament on Monday, as the Assembly’s last such session before the election of February 2016 to choose new members.
Ayatollah Yazdi addressed the session on Tuesday, emphasizing that in the rule of the tyrant, “the faqih (jurist in Persian) exercised its heavenly mandate according to a special mechanism; however, in the time of absolute rule of the faqih, no other fuqaha should interfere with the state affairs or government arrangements.”
Yazdi also touched upon the issue of elections of the Parliament and the Assembly of Experts in February 2016, bringing to the fore a much debated issue of ‘approbative supervision’ exercised by the Guardian Council to examine the general and specific qualifications of the election candidates during the history of the Islamic Republic; “the Guardian Council will supervise on the best manner of implementation of the elections, and definitely the Council should exercise its inherent function, and it would not abandon it for winning some circles’ hearts,” Yazdi asserted.
On the issue of electronic polling, Ayatollah Yazdi believed that the Ministry of the Interior should cooperate and elicit the Guardian Council’s agreement; “I am a strong advocate of the electronic voting; however, there should be a soft and hardware infrastructures in far-flung regions as well as urban centers for such elections,” he added.