LEGAL PROTECTION FOR BIOMEDICAL ETHICS IN ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

Iran is the only Islamic country that its legal system is based on Shi’a school of Islam and formal legislative system of the country encom-passes religious considerations through democratic-theocratic political system. In Iran religious, politico legal and ethical discourses are overlapping and have official and implicit interactions. Generally, in Iran, few laws and regulations have been exclusively ratified in order to legalize ethical issues in biomedical practice or to guarantee an ethical biomedical practices. But inside other more general laws, such as criminal or civil law, there are some parts or clauses related to the-se subjects. In this paper we reviewed those legalizations within Iran legal system that deal with ethical dimensions of issues such as abor-tion, organ transplantation, assisted reproduction, medical professional ethics, stem cell researches, helping people in serious dangers, confidentiality and euthanasia. Despite of noticeable achievements of legalizing ethical issues of biomedical practice in Iran during recent years, more attention should be paid to the issue of legalizing remaining topics for better organization of related activities and also protecting the human dignity and moral values, while considering pu-bic good. Issues such as human cloning, genetic engineering, stem cell researches and those concerning end of life cares in clinical set-tings, have not been legalized yet. On the other hand, the limited number of legalizations in these fields as organ transplantation and assisted reproduction are not comprehensive and just include one aspect of the subject as we showed in this paper. This situation in-creases the possibility of misinterpretations and misunderstanding. The need for a comprehensive law for biomedical practice while con-sidering ethical issues in Iran should be taken into consideration by responsible bodies.