Leader Appoints New Members to Iran’s Expediency Council

TEHRAN (defapress) – Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei appointed new members to the Expediency Council for a five-year period.

News ID: 65588

Date: 14 August 2017 - 14:23

In a decree on Monday, Imam Khamenei appointed Ayatollah Seyed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi as the new head of the council, a replacement for Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who died in January.

The Leader also installed Mohsen Rezaei as the secretary of the council again, and appointed a number of other legal and natural persons to it.

According to the Leader’s decree, the legal persons appointed to the Expediency Council include the three heads of the Iranian branches of power (namely the president, parliament speaker, and Judiciary chief), the Guardian Council’s Fuqaha (Islamic jurists who are experienced clerics), chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, a minister or head of an organization concerned with a specific subject being discussed in the Expediency Council, and chairman of a parliamentary commission concerned with a specific subject being discussed in the council.

Ayatollah Khamenei also appointed 38 natural persons to the council, including 13 clerics and 25 others.

In the decree, Imam Khamenei emphasized the necessity for a series of modifications in the structure and conduct of the Expediency Council, such as reorganization of the general policies and revision of the subjects, reorganization of the method of monitoring the implementation of policies, development of a mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of policies, establishment of full solidarity in the council’s administrative and managerial structures, and a plan to make the organization more agile  and omit the unnecessary sections.

The Expediency Council is an administrative assembly tasked with resolving differences or conflicts between the Parliament and the Guardian Council.