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June 18, 2009 10:01 AM

[Iran_Minutiae_Filter] I heard a few days ago that Former President Rafsanjani was going up to Qum to see if the Assembly of Experts had the votes to remove Ayatollah Khamanei from the position of Supreme Leader. How long would something like that take to happen? Would it have happened already if they had the votes?

The Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts are very strange legislative/governmental bodies, so I am trying to get some sense of time frame here.

-The Assembly of Experts is 86 people and has to meet twice a year [which, I'm guessing, means they don't meet very often].

-Rafsanjani is the head of this assembly [he was elected as such].

-He went to try and count these votes maybe 2-3 days ago. How long would something like that take? Would it take effect immediately? Is it possible that he called the assembly together and is now just waiting for things to get worse with the protests [i.e. more state-sponsored brutality] before he calls the vote?

Sorry -- I am very genuinely curious about how removing a Supreme Leader works.

posted by AlbatrossJones to law & government (2 comments total)

The very short answer is that there have only ever been two Supreme Leaders, and there's no meaningful precedent for anything like that. There are politics going on far beyond who-votes-how, and it's difficult-to-impossible for anyone to say what might happen.
posted by Tomorrowful at 11:05 AM on June 18

This is definitely a case where the overt mechanisms of government are stand-ins for what is being decided behind closed doors.

The people who are paid to guess about these things -- well, many of them are hazarding guesses, but I wouldn't count on them much. My own hunch is that there may be one or more bodies that make contradictory rulings and perhaps even a theocratic equivalent of Bush v. Gore where two different rulings need to be reconciled in a political cagematch.

I would not bet that Khamenei will be removed. An attempt may, however, be made.

Iran has a semblance of constitutional structure, but one that is as you put it "very strange" and is actually designed to separate centers of power from one another and make it difficult for them to act unilaterally. Whether the outcome respects broadly the rule of law, even as it may be understood in Iran, is probably up for grabs at this point.
posted by dhartung at 8:40 PM on June 18