Increase in Security Institutions in the Islamic Republic; Judicial Protection and Information Agency to be Formed

Fraz wrote: The plan to establish the Judicial Protection and Information Agency is on the weekly agenda of the Parliament. This plan was approved by the National Security Commission last February. According to this report, if the plan receives the Parliament's approval and then the Guardian Council's confirmation, the country will witness the birth of the 'third nationwide security and intelligence agency.' It is said that the drafters of this plan have repeatedly emphasized that their proposed organization will only operate within the framework of domestic issues and the judiciary. Currently, in the intelligence structure of the Islamic Republic, in addition to the Ministry of Intelligence, there are institutions such as the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Protection Intelligence Organization of the IRGC, the Army Intelligence Directorate, the Protection Intelligence Organization of the Army, the Police Command Intelligence Organization, the Protection Intelligence Organization of the Police Command, the Protection Intelligence Organization of the Ministry of Defense, the Protection Intelligence Office of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, and the Office of Policy-Making for Protection Intelligence of the Commander-in-Chief. In the political literature of recent decades in Iran, intelligence agencies outside the Ministry of Intelligence are referred to as 'parallel intelligence,' which, in addition to being unaccountable to entities such as the Islamic Consultative Assembly, also possess high authorities and opaque budgets. From 1983 to 2009, for 26 years, only the Ministry of Intelligence operated as the national intelligence-security entity in the country. However, in 2009, the merger of the IRGC Intelligence Directorate and several other directorates, including the Strategic Intelligence Directorate of the IRGC, led to the birth of the 'IRGC Intelligence Organization,' which began its work as the second national intelligence organization in the country. The acknowledgment of corruption within the judiciary dates back to August 2021 when Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i, the head of the judiciary, instructed the supervisory bodies of this branch to develop a program to 'prevent the infiltration of corrupt elements' to protect the judicial system and ordered organizations such as the Protection and Information Center and the Disciplinary Prosecutor's Office to draft a program for 'preventing the infiltration of corrupt elements' into the judiciary. Mohseni-Eje'i stated that 'corrupt elements' are trying to infiltrate everywhere, including the judiciary, and asked his subordinate managers to ensure that the judiciary does not become 'disgraced' due to the 'slip of a few' employees. In May 2021, the spokesperson for the judiciary announced the arrest of over 200 employees in the judiciary for misconduct and stated that the judiciary's protection intelligence had identified 237 'collaborators involved in corrupt practices.' Gholam-Hossein Esmaili also mentioned that several official document registrars and 161 lawyers and judicial experts had been arrested. In recent years, Akbar Tabari, the executive deputy of the judiciary during the presidency of Sadegh Larijani, was arrested on corruption-related charges, and simultaneously, calls for the prosecution of Larijani himself regarding land grabbing and the revelation of certain issues related to villa construction cases in Lavasan, Tehran province, had emerged.