Litigation- Filing and Defending Lawsuits
1. Who can go to court?
If you encounter a problem in the process of carrying out your professional and business affairs that requires going to court and filing a lawsuit, you need to know the rules and important points that are hidden from many people. Ignorance of the procedures and conditions of submitting a claim will cause your claim to be rejected and never accepted even before the initial submission. The two main conditions for accepting your lawsuit in Iran’s courts are “legal capacity” and “benefit”.
2. What are the conditions for accepting a lawsuit in court?
If you don’t have the legal capacity to file a lawsuit, it’s better to forget it! Legal capacity includes three conditions: maturity, sanity, and growth. Capacity conditions are general conditions that are required to perform other administrative and professional affairs.
For example, without these three conditions, it is not even possible to get basic banking services such as opening an account. By sanity condition, the legislator seeks to verify the mental health of the person and prove the absence of insanity. Two other conditions, i.e. maturity and growth, can be interpreted in the same way. The maturity limit is the same as the Shari’a limit of 15 years for boys and 9 years for girls to file a non-financial claim. Filing a financial lawsuit before reaching the age of 18 requires proof of maturity in court.
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3. What does “growth” mean in the opinion of the legislator?
The last condition of legal capacity is growth, which is one of the most difficult parts of determining a person’s eligibility in filing a lawsuit due to the complexity of proving. According to the law, an “adult” is a person who has the right to earn money and has the right to use his property and financial rights.
The important question that is raised here is that if a person lacks the capacity to file a lawsuit, will his rights be violated, given the strictness of the legislator in determining the capacity conditions? Undoubtedly, the answer is no. The law has appointed representatives to fulfill the rights of the incapacitated persons.
In general, these legal representatives are divided into two categories:
For minors, non-adults, or insane persons who have not developed since childhood and have continued until puberty, their father or paternal grandfather or guardian appointed by them is considered their legal representative when they go to court. If a person does not have one of these representatives, the court will act on the selection of a guardian for such persons based on articles 1217 and 1218 of the Civil Code.
2. If a person suffers from a lack of growth or insanity after reaching the age of puberty, the court will appoint a guardian to file a lawsuit on behalf of that person.
4. Explaining the concept of “benefit” in filing a lawsuit
At the beginning of the article, we mentioned that before filing a lawsuit in court, there are two preconditions: legal capacity and benefit. We have briefly explained the first condition. Now let’s see what the legislator means by “benefit” in filing a lawsuit.
Although this matter seems very simple at the beginning, in fact, there are many people who file a lawsuit on behalf of their children or relatives. This is determined according to Article 2 of the Civil Procedure Law; Based on the fact that: “No court can hear a lawsuit unless the beneficiary… has requested the hearing of the lawsuit according to the law.” Therefore, any lawsuit should be done by the claimant himself or his lawyer.
In other words, the meaning of being a beneficiary according to the law is that if a personal lawsuit is accepted and a judgment is issued in his favor, the person who filed the lawsuit will benefit from that direct benefit and not anyone else.
Interestingly, many lawsuits in Iranian courts are rejected every year due to neglect or lack of knowledge of these simple conditions.
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