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On Jan. 13, senior members of Iran’s reformist government, which was elected in 2001 with 77 percent of the vote, threatened to resign if the Guardian Council, a 12-member panel of clerics charged with maintaining the Islamic character of the Iranian state, did not overturn a ban preventing half of the candidates in the Feb. 20 parliamentary elections from running on the grounds that they were not sufficiently loyal to Iran’s theocratic government. Reformist deputies in the 290-member Majlis legislative assembly, 83 of whom have been prevented from standing for reelection, have staged a sit-in protest at the Majlis since Jan. 10, when the Guardian Council announced the ban. In this unsigned editorial, Tehran’s reformist Yas-e No turns the charge against the Guardian Council, arguing that their ban undermines the republican aspects of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s constitution.
