Tehran, July 18: An Iranian minister, who recently criticized a top decision-making council led by Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, has denied making the controversial comments.
“I never said the Expediency Council ruling is unconstitutional,” Minister of Justice Gholam-Hossein Elham told reporters on July 17, rejecting previous reports to the contrary.
On the previous day, local media reported that Elham had attacked the Expediency Council for passing a motion banning him from serving simultaneously in two posts, one in the executive branch of government as a minister and one at the supervisory Guardian Council.
Led by top cleric and former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Expediency Council is one of the Iran’s highest bodies that holds overall supervisory powers.
The Expediency Council was initially established to settle disagreements between the Majlis (Iran’s parliament) and the Guardian Council – which is a 12-member body tasked with overseeing election procedures and parliamentary legislation.
According to Thursday reports, Elham had said that the Expediency Council’s move was “in contradiction with the Constitution.”
“It seems that at the moment it is in the interests of the country not to abide by the Constitution,” news outlets quoted Elham as saying on the sidelines of a Wednesday cabinet meeting.
He rejected the reports, saying: “What I was actually trying to ask was what interest was the council seeking to secure by deliberating on such a trivial matter that was against the constitution.”
Elham, who is also President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government spokesman, did say, however that the government would comply with the ruling.
“What I said was that we will implement whatever becomes law, not that we will carry out what we find to be lawful,” he explained.
The new disagreement between the government and Expediency Council comes just weeks after Ahmadinejad accused Hashemi-Rafsanjani and his family members of financial corruption during a televised election debate.
—–Agencies