Assessing the Legal Status of Private Sphere Through Comparing Family Law Systems of Iran and Germany

Abstract

The present study aims at assessing the status of the private sphere in the legal system of Iran as a Jurisprudence-based one in a comparison with Germany’s. The modern state has such limited the scope of private sphere that the privacy of family as its most important element is dubious. The private sphere exists and forms the human society besides the public sphere and the state only when it is subject to the supplementary rules of private law and the state does not regulate its relations with the mandatory rules except for observing the international human rights. The research method is a comparative study of Iranian and German family law with a deductive approach. The findings imply that in the German legal system, the state guarantees human rights requirements, especially freedom and equality in the family, but its intervention is not limited to this and beyond it, it limits the private sphere and, as a result, the personal rights. In Iran, the state also regulates family relations comprehensively, although this regulation is not necessarily intended to observe human rights. The result of the research demonstrates that in modern relations between the state and the nation, the family is not legally considered to be a part of private sphere, and this means that the scope of the private sphere is limited to the privacy.

Keywords

• freedom
• equality
• tax
• state intervention
• privacy