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Since the last few years, criminal policy authorities of Iran started to withdraw their previous emphasis on repressive approaches and under the impact of criminological studies and translation of policy initiatives in western countries new concept and vocabulary were entered into official discourse and criminal justice policy of Iran. Consequently, a list of community-based approaches to criminal justice system such as community-based punishment, community-based settlement council, community policing and community crime prevention became integral parts of the third and fourth 5-year Development plan (2000-4 & 2005-9) and the Second Judicial Reform Plan (2004-8) very rapidly. Regardless of how these ideas and policies are introduced to the Iranian criminal policy, the most important questions should be asked in this field are that to what extent thes policies will meet current needs of criminal policy of Iran? To what extent community-based approaches are adapted to socio-economic, cultural and political contexts in Iran? It seems that, successful reforms in the area of public participation in criminal justice needs to some pre-conditions such as; structural changes, cultural capacity building and understanding the principles or rationales which are standing behind each of these reforms. Our effort in this article is to describe and criticize two important aspects of community-based approach to criminal justice in Iran; Community-based punishments and settlement councils.

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This paper aims to probe the nature of possible responses to the actions taken by certain foreign companies to unilaterally terminate their services to the Iranian public and private Internet service providers. The paper examines specifically the procedural aspects of the issue and concludes that due to the lack of the biased nature of relationship between sysops and Internet users and the absence of an effective international body, it is highly unlikely that any legal action could bring about desired results. The paper, in the end, suggests some other non legal strategies as topics for the future research.

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Nowadays, by the increasing expansion of commercial contracts in the international arena, the use of multi-tiered dispute resolution clauses have been increased. These clauses have many functions for the parties compared to other judicial and arbitration methods. Identifying this issue is very useful in the practical procedure, assuming that the terms of the dispute resolution are binding, the arbitrator starts the arbitration regardless of the observance of these terms by the parties, the arbitration award is invalid due to the lack of competence of the arbitrator, or the violation of the terms is simply a matter of admissibility. A group is of the opinion that non-compliance with the condition of multi-tiered dispute resolution clauses directly affects the jurisdiction, and the arbitrator has exceeded the limits of his jurisdiction, subsequently the decision issued according to the law is null, and it has no legal effect. In contrast, some believe that this issue is related to the admissibility, which is a gentler approach and in line with respecting the sovereignty of the volition governance principle to resolve the dispute through arbitration and non-intervention of the court. Basically, their basis for supporting this theory is that the claim is merely defective in form, and the arbitration agreement between the parties is valid. Regarding the types of legal reactions to non-compliance with the conditions of dispute resolution, suspending the arbitration process at the same time as granting a deadline to comply with the pre-arbitration conditions is preferable to other solutions.