Iran

Information uploaded as at September 2026; Some hyperlinks may not be available due to internet outage

AT A GLANCE

Iran is in the early stages of adopting AI across law enforcement and its legal system, with deployment that remains limited, largely experimental, and unevenly documented. In law enforcement, authorities are moving toward data-driven and AI-enabled policing, supported by surveillance and traffic infrastructure applied in public-order and dress-code enforcement contexts. Prosecutors are using AI systems to spot patterns in illicit financial transactions, whereas the judiciary is pursuing a broader smart justice agenda, using AI tools to assist with case management and the analysis of large volumes of court decisions, while retaining human judges as the final decision-makers. Public-facing tools, such as AI legal assistants, are intended to widen access to legal guidance for defendants and victims. AIadoption has developed ahead of a dedicated legal framework. Training remains non-mandatory.

There is no national law expressly regulating the use of AI in criminal proceedings. Instead, existing general frameworks apply, including access to data and privacy laws, cybersecurity frameworks, and protections of fundamental rights, alongside emerging national policies and guidelines on AI and data governance.

USE

As at September 2026, AI is used in Iran to support policing, judicial administration, legal research, and public legal services through limited tools.

Law enforcement

Predictive analytics

Iranian authorities have described the Police Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran (‘FARAJA’) as moving toward data-driven and AI-enabled policing. FARAJA’s Centre for Data Management and Analysis has described the creation of data-analysis laboratories in specialised police units and centralised platforms for police data analysis, with the stated goal of improving smart, data-based decision-making. These tools are reportedly being used to assist with crime detection and prevention through analysis of crime patterns.

Data review and analysis

Facial recognition technology has reportedly been deployed by Iranian police to enforce mandatory hijab laws. As early as January 2023, reports surfaced that Iranian authorities were using AI-powered facial recognition to identify women violating dress codes remotely, enabling fines, vehicle confiscations, and arrests without any direct police interaction. Traffic police reportedly began using these facial recognition algorithms as early as 2020, and by some accounts, more than a million SMS warnings have been sent to women drivers threatening confiscation of their vehicles for failing to wear the hijab properly, with tens of thousands of vehicles ultimately seized.

Iranian law enforcement agencies have been criticised for using facial recognition technology to target opposition, by using cameras to identify protesters. Similarly, various human rights organisations have criticised FARAJA’s facial recognition tools, alleging they have been repeatedly used to spy on Iranian citizens. According to the OECD’s AI Incidents Monitor, the facial recognition system enforcing mandatory hijab laws has been classified as an AI-driven human rights violation, given its role in enabling punitive action, threats, and even deaths linked to enforcement, largely without due process.

AI and smart-traffic tools are also reportedly used in operational policing. Reports indicate that police traffic units deploy AI or smart systems in traffic enforcement and violation processing, including smart traffic-control systems, licence-plate recognition, and automated or semi-automated registration of traffic violations.

Prosecutors

Operational support

At a BRICS prosecutors-general meeting in July 2025, Iran’s Prosecutor General, Mohammad Movahedi-Azad, announced that his office has rolled out AI-driven systems aimed at catching cybercriminals. According to his remarks, reported by Young Journalists Club and Shahrara News, these tools are used to spot patterns in illicit financial transactions and follow the money through organised-crime networks. The Prosecutor General claimed that the systems outperform human investigators by a factor of hundreds or even thousands in some instances.

Courts

Case management

The Sana System is a nationwide electronic judicial service system and administrative case-management platform which supports the online administration of procedure through digitally timestamping events and tracking delivery of documents. Sana was launched by the Iranian Judiciary in 2015, and replaced paper‑based filing and service of process with digital submission, electronic notice, and party‑facing case tracking across all criminal, civil, and administrative matters. Sana uses AI only in a limited capacity, primarily for biometric identity verification during registration and login (facial recognition via video selfies and signature matching) and related clerical automation.

In October 2025, the Iranian judiciary deployed a smart expert referral tool, developed to eliminate human intervention in referring cases to experts and to automate the assignment process. As at September 2026, further details about the tool are not publicly available.

The Asset Identification System allows judges to access government databases which contain property records of convicts.

Legal research, analysis and drafting support

Under its Smart Justice framework, Iran’s judiciary has formally committed to using AI‑enabled tools to support judicial research, legal analysis, and drafting assistance, while maintaining human judges as the ultimate decision‑makers.

Iran is piloting the Tenad System, an advanced judicial database and AI tool used within the Iranian court system. The system draws from a dataset of over 110 million judicial decisions and allows natural language processing analysis. The system is also equipped with a conflicting-rulings system, which can extract conflicting rulings and laws. The platform serves as a core resource for training and educating new judges, ensuring that they have data-driven access to past precedents. The Supreme Court of Iran uses the platform to monitor and supervise lower courts and evaluate judicial performance.

RoboLegal is the first AI-powered legal assistant that seeks to foster a fairer and more transparent justice system by automating routine legal processes and extending services to remote or underserved areas. It provides smart legal advice and answers questions from the database of Iranian case law, and can be used by citizens, lawyers, and judges. The tool was independently developed by Iranian innovators and trained on the country’s legal frameworks. RoboLegal can quickly analyse legal documents and case histories. State officials, some of whom attended the RoboLegal launch ceremony, have said that the tool is an important step toward modernising Iran’s legal services and expanding public access to justice.

Defence

Legal research, analysis and drafting support

As at September 2026, there are no explicit reports of AI use by defence counsel in criminal proceedings.

However, defence work may be supported by Iranian-developed legal AI tools such as Vakil-GPT (a Persian-language platform to assist Iranian lawyers in conducting legal research, analysis of case law and administrative automation) and AI Vakil, another commercially developed startup tool for assisting lawyers in case identification and analysis. These tools are commercially developed to provide broader assistance to lawyers, although may not protect defence lawyers from confidentiality concerns.

Defence lawyers may also make use of RoboLegal, discussed above.

Victims

Case management

Adalat Hamrah (عدالت همراه / ‘Companion Justice’) is the official mobile application made available to Sana users (discussed above), which aggregates and provides user‑friendly access to Sana and other electronic judicial services.

Legal research, analysis and drafting support

Victims can rely on legal AI tools, such as RoboLegal mentioned above, to assess their legal claims and receive quick and practical legal guidance to preliminary questions that might otherwise inhibit their access to legal support.

Iranian academics have relied on AI analysis to conduct a large-scale review of online narratives and responses related to intimate partner physical violence in Iran. Researchers relied on AI to support evidence identification, triage, and contextual analysis relevant to victims, advocates, and legal processes. They also developed machine learning pipelines that assisted with the detection of credible first‑person accounts of physical domestic abuse within a massive corpus of Persian-language online forum posts. Using large language models alongside human annotators, the authors designed classifiers that helped distinguish intimate partner physical violence narratives from non‑abuse content, even in a low‑resource language environment. By implementing a participatory AI design focused on ‘integrating the voices of real stakeholders in […] AI system-building processes’, the authors were able to analyse millions of posts to identify a smaller, high‑confidence set of abuse accounts that could otherwise be missed due to stigma, anonymity, or lack of formal reporting channels, suggesting AI is being used as an essential initial evidence‑screening tool.

TRAINING

As at September 2026, Iran does not have systematic or mandatory training on responsible AI use by law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, or lawyers. There were also no publicly reported ad hoc training initiatives identified.

REGULATION

Iran does not yet have a comprehensive AI law. Instead, AI is regulated through a combination of policy instruments alongside cybersecurity legislation, cybercrime and criminal procedure rules governing electronic evidence, and developing privacy and digital identity frameworks.

AI Regulations

The National AI Document, adopted in June 2024, sets a vision for Iran to become a top‑10 global leader in AI by March 2034, leveraging an advanced AI ecosystem grounded in Islamic values to enhance national security, social welfare, and governance. Its strategic policies emphasise human capital development, strong infrastructure, innovation-driven economic growth, responsible and ethical AI use, and applying AI to solve national challenges while safeguarding human dignity, social cohesion, and justice, and engaging selectively in international cooperation.

The Judiciary Transformation Document seeks to modernise the judiciary through digital infrastructure and ‘data-driven justice’ in an effort to reduce corruption and conflict in judicial rulings. It was rolled out along with the National AI Document, and was drafted by the head of the judiciary. In April 2024, the document was updated to include:

• ‘Maximum smartification’ of procedure in courts;
• The deployment of AI to identify conflicting judicial decisions for judges;
• Omitting human intervention in the ‘smart’ referral of judges to experts; and
• Promoting judicial efficiency through the enhancement of ‘data-driven decision-making’.

Changes proposed by the Document find their legal basis in the Directive on Smartening and Digitising Judicial Processes and Case Files, approved in June 2024.

The use of surveillance technology to target women has been formalised through legislation. In 2023, a draft Hijab and Chastity Bill was being debated, explicitly mandating the use of AI, including fixed and mobile cameras, to identify women violating dress codes. The bill included provisions requiring police to ‘create and strengthen AI systems’ for this purpose, and introduced fines, long prison terms, and travel bans for offenders, as well as penalties for businesses and celebrities who failed to enforce compliance. The bill was approved by the Guardian Council and passed into law in December 2024. There was pushback against this Bill, with UN experts expressing their concern about the egregious human rights abuses.

Guidelines for practitioners

As at September 2026, Iran has not formally adopted the UNESCO Guidelines for the Use of AI Systems in Courts and Tribunals (2025).

Criminal procedure rules

The Criminal Procedure Code 1999, as amended in 2013, prescribes how crimes are investigated and prosecuted, how sentences are issued, and how judgments are reviewed and executed. The Code recognises electronic procedural materials and regulates telecommunications control. While the Code does not specifically address AI or AI-generated evidence, several of its rules may shape how AI can be used in criminal proceedings. For example, Article 685 of the Code provides that computer data created, stored, or transmitted by parties can be admissible as evidence, if the system operates in a manner that does not compromise the data. Under Article 686, this test applies to any offence in which electronic evidence is relied on. AI-generated or AI-processed material would therefore be likely to face a reliability-based test.

Such rules may be supplemented by the Computer Crimes Law 2009, particularly procedural rules contained in Chapter 2, which refer to the following measures available for the collection of digital evidence: preservation of traffic data (Articles 33-33); expedited preservation of stored computer data (Article 34); data presentation (Article 35); data and computer and telecommunication systems, search and seizure (Article 36-47); interception of content data (Article 48). Admissibility of digital evidence is further addressed in Chapter 3 of the law. These rules may also be applicable to deepfake evidence.

Data protection legislation

Iran has not enacted a comprehensive personal data protection law. Iran’s data privacy regime is shaped in part by the Law on Publishing and Access to Data (2010) and the Electronic Commerce Law (2004), as well as prior draft legislation, including the Draft Bill on the Protection of Data and Privacy in Cyberspace (2018). As of 2023, the Draft Bill had not been approved by parliament, and no timetable for its consideration had been announced. The Draft Bill is mentioned to show where reform may be heading.

Electronic Commerce Law (2004)

The main binding data rules are in Articles 58–61 of the Electronic Commerce Law (2004), with penalties in Articles 71–72. Under Article 58, storing, processing or distributing data that may reveal ethnic or tribal origin, religious or moral beliefs, or physical, psychological or sexual conditions is illegal without explicit consent. Under Article 59, processing other personal data electronically requires the person’s consent, and the data’s content must comply with parliamentary statutes. Article 59 also requires that the purposes be specified and clearly described; that data be collected only to the extent required and used only for the purposes disclosed at collection; and that data be correct and up to date. It gives the data subject rights of access, correction and complete deletion. Breaching Article 58 is punishable by one to three years' imprisonment under Article 71. Under Article 72, where the offenses relating to personal data messages are committed by Certificate Service Providers or other responsible institutions, the offender receives the maximum punishment under Article 71, i.e., three years’ imprisonment. Where the offense results from negligence, Article 73 provides for three months’ to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 50,000,000 Rials.

Law on Publishing and Access to Data (2010)

The Law on Publication and Free Access to Information (adopted 2009, proclaimed 2010) is binding, but it governs disclosure of and access to information rather than the collection and processing of personal data. It applies to public institutions and to private institutions providing public services, such as banks, professional associations and the stock exchange. Under Article 14, a request for access to information must be refused if it concerns the privacy of individuals or seeks information obtained in violation of privacy laws. Under Article 15, institutions must withhold a third party’s personal information unless the third party consents clearly and in writing, the applicant is the third party’s legal guardian or representative, or the applicant is a public institution acting within its duties. Article 9 of the implementing bylaw further prohibits institutions from publishing or providing private information restricted by law unless otherwise ordered by law. Individuals may access their personal data held by institutions providing public services and request its correction.

Guidelines for the Protection of User Privacy on Cyberspace Systems and Platforms (2024)

In 2024, Iran published the Guidelines for the Protection of User Privacy on Cyberspace Systems and Platforms, which recognised limited user rights over the collection, processing, storage, and deletion of personal data, and introduced principles such as transparency, consent, data minimization, encryption of identity data, and a qualified right to data deletion. The Guideline sets out four articles on provider obligations, enforcement by regulators and licensing authorities, development towards national identification system, and oversight of implementation. Adopted by the Supreme Commission for Regulating Cyberspace as a mandatory executive directive rather than parliamentary legislation, and described as the first part of a broader set of data-protection policies and requirements, the Guideline aims to reduce privacy risks by requiring both private entities and government executive bodies to comply with its data-handling conditions within two months, and within three months for data collected before it was adopted.

There is no national data protection authority in Iran, but the Supreme Council for Cyberspace (‘SCC’) is the country’s top internet policy-making body. In 2019, the SCC issued the Digital Identity Verification Resolution aimed at establishing ‘valid’ online identities and limiting anonymity in cyberspace by establishing mandatory identity verification as a prerequisite for virtually all online interactions. The Resolution creates a national digital identity framework—covering individuals, services, devices, and content—under which all internet, intranet (National Information Network), and smart government services must authenticate users through a unique, legally binding identifier. The full text of the resolution had not been publicly released at the time of the adoption and has therefore not been subject to scrutiny by other officials, civil society groups, or the general public. Based on the limited information made public, the resolution proposes an online identity authentication system intended to ‘establish an ecosystem for infrastructure providers to facilitate free, healthy, and responsible interactions while respecting individual and collective rights.’

Cybersecurity laws

Iran’s Cybersecurity Lawcame into effect in 2022. It provides a legal framework for the protection of information systems and critical infrastructure against cyber threats. It emphasises the establishment of a national cybersecurity committee tasked with overseeing its implementation and ensuring compliance among organisations across various sectors. The Law requires organisations handling sensitive data to implement minimum security standards, report cyber incidents, ensure data localisation and controlled access. These rules might constrain AI functionality in criminal proceedings, especially machine-learning models requiring large external datasets, and AI tools relying on continuous external updates.

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace is the highest policy-making body for all digital affairs, including AI. It issues binding directives that other agencies must follow. Enforcement is carried out by the Cyber Police and the National Committee for Content Verification, which monitor digital platforms for compliance with content regulations (Article 30 of the Computer Crimes Law (2009)).

Human rights

AI and related digital tools may implicate human rights considerations due to the expanded state capacity for surveillance, identification, and punishment.

Iran’s domestic laws contain some guarantees that may be relevant where AI is used in criminal proceedings. Iran’s Criminal Procedure Code opens with a set of principles that apply at every stage of the criminal case, including that judicial authorities must act with impartiality and independence (Article 3); any restrictive measures, deprivation of liberty, or intrusion of privacy is not permitted except by law, regulation, or under judicial authority (Article 4); and proceedings must guarantee the rights of parties and rules must be applied uniformly to people prosecuted under similar circumstances for similar crimes (Article 2).

The Law on Respecting Legitimate Freedoms and Protecting Citizens’ Rights 2004 binds all courts and judicial staff, and includes that arrests and detentions must be based on laws and judicial orders (Article 1); sentences must be in accordance with legal procedures (Article 2); and seizure of documents and evidence not pertaining to the relevant crimes is prohibited (Article 8). These guarantees are subject to important qualifications, enforced mainly through penalties and internal oversight, rather than exclusion of evidence.

Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (‘ICCPR’). Relevant rights include: the right to a fair trial, to judicial independence, and to express one’s views and have them considered in legal proceedings (Article 14 ICCPR); the right to non-discrimination (Articles 4 and 14 ICCPR); and the right to privacy and information self-determination and data protection (Article 17 ICCPR).

UN experts, legal scholars, and human rights organisations have expressed concern that technology-enabled surveillance and AI practices in Iran may undermine freedom of expression, privacy, equality, due process, and legal certainty.

Iran has also ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which contains relevant provisions, including:

• Article 40 – Juvenile justice: requires that a child alleged, accused of, or recognised as having infringed the penal law be treated in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child's sense of dignity and worth, reinforcing respect for the human rights of others, and taking into account the child's age and the desirability of reintegration.
• Article 16 – Right to privacy: provides that no child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on their honour and reputation, and that the child has the right to the protection of the law against such interference.

Outlook

In July 2024, Iran established the National AI Organization (NAIO) through decree. The NAIO was established to consolidate Iran’s various initiatives regarding emerging technologies into a centralized governance structure. The primary objective of the NAIO is to place Iran amongst the top 10 global AI leaders and promote growth and development through legal frameworks, digital infrastructure, and research.

In 2025, Iran’s Parliament contemplated a bill on Combating the Spread of Untrue News Content, which imposed penalties for producing or circulating content deemed ‘untrue’. The bill was not an AI-specific statute, but it addressed online content, platform obligations, and state enforcement against false information. It discussed the use of new and emerging technologies in relation to monitoring content. Its broad terminology and penalties created potential risks for freedom of expression and privacy. The bill has since been withdrawn for further review.

In February 2026, Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology announced that it plans to launch the Headquarters for AI Technology Development, comprising 15 AI laboratories at universities across the country focused on developing and testing fundamental AI models. According to public reporting, Iran’s proposal to develop AI standards and large language models (‘LLMs’) is set to be implemented within a roadmap established by the International Organization for Standardization (‘ISO’).

CASES

As at September 2026, no reported Iranian court decisions addressing the use of AI in judicial decision-making or legal proceedings were identified.