TEHRAN – Ali Motahari, vice parliament speaker, has warned that any sort of supervision on parliamentarians will make them conservative.

 In making the comments, Motahari was referring to a recent debate on which entity will play the final supervisory role in connection with parliament members.
“The supervision of another supervisor on the Majlis (parliament) will cause numerous blights, with one being representatives’ conservatism,” he said.  
The debate itself was stirred by different interpretations of a paragraph of general elections policies announced by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on October 15. 
Paragraph 13 calls for formulation of a set of rules to ensure parliamentarians carry out their responsibilities appropriately. Also, the Leader urges working out measures to disqualify representatives in case they “lose the criteria for being members of the Majlis.” 
Motahari has insisted that the parliament is intrinsically endowed with the right to play a “self-supervisory role.” 
On the contrary, Guardian Council spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodaei has supported an “external supervisor,” reasoning that a self-supervisory mechanism lacks sufficiency. 
The Guardian Council, a group composed of six jurists and six clerics, vets presidential and parliamentary candidates and generally, supervises the whole election process.  
However, Motahari, who represents Tehran in the parliament, believes a different supervisor other than the parliament itself is basically impossible as it gets bogged down into a “circularity.”
“If the Guardian Council supervises the Majlis, the council should be supervised by another supervisor itself, and this leads to circularity,” he commented.