What Is the Assembly of Experts in Iran and What Does It Do?

It appoints the Supreme Leader, watches over him and can dismiss him. Article 107 of Iran’s constitution gives the assembly the task of reviewing the qualified Islamic jurists and choosing one as leader. Article 111 lets it remove a leader who can no longer carry out his duties or who loses one of the qualifications the constitution requires, which include justice, piety, scholarship in Islamic law and political judgment.

When the post falls vacant, the constitution hands the leader’s duties to a temporary council of the president, the head of the judiciary and one cleric from the Guardian Council until the assembly decides, and it tells the assembly to act as quickly as possible. That arrangement covered the nine days between the killing of Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, and the vote for his son.

Outside a succession, the assembly holds regular sessions, normally twice a year, and issues statements on the state of the country. It does not pass laws, approve budgets or set foreign, military or nuclear policy. Those powers sit with the leader, the president, parliament and the Supreme National Security Council.

Iranians vote for them directly, province by province, but only after the Guardian Council approves who may run. Candidates must be experts in Islamic jurisprudence, and the Guardian Council tests that through written and oral exams before it publishes the list of approved names. Members serve eight years.

The filter is tight. For the election of March 1, 2024, which chose the current, sixth assembly, 510 people applied and the Guardian Council approved 144 of them for 88 seats. It barred former president Hassan Rouhani, who had sat in the assembly for more than two decades. The Interior Ministry put turnout at 41 percent for that day’s combined parliamentary and assembly vote, the lowest for a parliamentary election since the 1979 revolution.

Critics in Iran point to a circle in the design. Six of the Guardian Council’s 12 members are clerics appointed by the Supreme Leader, and the other six are lawyers nominated by the judiciary chief, whom the leader also appoints. So the leader’s appointees decide who may stand for the body that is meant to supervise him. The next assembly election is due in 2032.

Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Movahedi Kermani, a conservative cleric born in 1931, has chaired the assembly since May 21, 2024, when members elected him with 55 votes. His deputies are Hashem Hosseini Bushehri and Alireza Arafi. Iranian state media still described him as chairman in July 2026, when he demanded accountability for the killing of Ali Khamenei.

His predecessors show how the body has drifted to the right. Ali Meshkini chaired it from 1983 to 2007, followed by the pragmatist former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from 2007 to 2011, Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi Kani from 2011 until his death in 2014 and, after two short interim chairmanships, the hardliner Ahmad Jannati from 2016 to 2024. All 88 seats are held by clerics, and hardline conservatives won the clear majority in 2024.

Each time it acted within days of the leader’s death. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, died on June 3, 1989. The next day the assembly chose Ali Khamenei, then president, by a reported 60 votes. Because he was not a senior religious authority, as the original constitution required, the choice was first treated as interim; a revised constitution, approved by referendum in July 1989, dropped that requirement, and the assembly confirmed him in August.

The second succession came in war. A US-Israeli strike on February 28, 2026, killed Ali Khamenei in Tehran. The assembly met in Qom under continuing air strikes and named his son Mojtaba on March 8. Mohsen Heidari, a member, told state television that more than two-thirds of the 88 members attended, the quorum the law requires, and that Mojtaba Khamenei won nearly 85 percent of the votes cast. The assembly published no vote count.

The choice of a leader’s son was attacked inside and outside Iran as hereditary rule in a republic born from overthrowing a monarchy. Supporters answered that the assembly alone holds the power to appoint and that family ties neither qualify nor disqualify a candidate. Mojtaba Khamenei, wounded in the February strike, has not appeared in public since and governs through written messages, such as his order for a response without geographical limits.

Yes. Israeli aircraft struck the assembly’s office building in Qom on March 3, 2026, while the body was working to choose a successor. Israeli officials said the aim was to disrupt the succession and claimed the assembly was meeting there.

Iranian officials gave a different account. They described the building as an old auxiliary office that was not used for the assembly’s sessions. Whatever the target, the strike did not stop the process: five days later, the assembly met in Qom and named the new leader.

On paper, yes; in practice it never has. Article 111 gives it the power to dismiss a leader who becomes incapable of fulfilling his duties or loses a required qualification, and the assembly keeps a standing committee that is meant to monitor whether the leader still meets them. No leader has been removed, and the committee’s work has never been made public.

The question is no longer abstract. Iranian officials have described Mojtaba Khamenei’s wounds as light, while US and Israeli intelligence assessments described him as badly hurt. The assembly has not questioned his fitness. Its November 12 statement instead left the NPT question to officials acting under his guidance.