Toward a Non-Discriminatory Approach to Determining the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility for Iranian Girls: Ayatollah Mousavi Bojnourdi’s Reinterpretation of Penal Majority in Shi’a Islam

Following the Islamic Revolution, a point of contention in Iranian law was the designation of the minimum age of full criminal responsibility as 9 years for girls and 15 years for boys. Thus, Iranian law exempted individuals from criminal responsibility before they reached the age of maturity, and assigned them full criminal responsibility immediately thereafter. This article examines the views of Ayatollah Bojnourdi, who emphasized the necessity of distinguishing between physical maturity, and legal and criminal maturity. The goal of this article is, first, to understand how Bojnourdi questioned the theory of traditional Shi’a jurists concerning the ages of maturity of girls and boys, and on what jurisprudential grounds he based his theory that the onset of maturity is non-contractual. Additionally, this article seeks to explore Bojnourdi’s jurisprudential justification of the possibility of distinguishing the minimum age of criminal responsibility from that of religious responsibility.