Public Liability and Administrative Accountability for Environmental Harm and Regulatory Omissions in Iran’s Oil and Gas Sector

Ebrahimi, Seyed Nasrollah; Haghani, Bita; Farahzadi, Ali

doi:10.22050/pbr.2026.577246.1431

Public Liability and Administrative Accountability for Environmental Harm and Regulatory Omissions in Iran’s Oil and Gas Sector

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Seyed Nasrollah Ebrahimi ¹

Bita Haghani ²

Ali Farahzadi ³

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Private and Islamic Law, Faculty of Law and Political Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

² Department of Public Law, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

³ Facility of law and political sciences, university of Tehran,Tehran,Iran

https://doi.org/10.22050/pbr.2026.577246.1431

Abstract

This article examines public liability and administrative accountability for environmental and climate risks and harms in Iran’s oil and gas sector. It explains how recurrent harms, including oil pollution, industrial accidents, and chronic air-quality crises, are intensified by regulatory omissions and fragmented institutional mandates. The study clarifies when governmental bodies and state-owned operators may bear responsibility not only for polluting conduct, but also for failures of prevention, supervision, and timely response. Using doctrinal legal analysis combined with institutional governance analysis, it maps the interaction between constitutional and statutory environmental duties, civil and criminal liability tools, and administrative-law mechanisms for challenging unlawful inaction. The findings suggest that Iran’s framework contains significant formal safeguards, yet accountability is often weakened by overlapping competences, under-enforcement, and evidentiary barriers in proving omission-based causation and attribution. Judicial review of administrative inaction provides an important corrective, but it rarely suffices to internalize environmental costs or deter systematic negligence. Drawing brief comparative insights, the article argues that effective governance requires clearer allocation of duties, enforceable standards of diligence for public authorities, and credible oversight capable of triggering corrective action before harm becomes irreversible. It proposes targeted reforms, notably codifying a “public duty of care,” strengthening coordination and transparency, widening access to remedies against manifest non-performance, and establishing an independent oversight function to reduce blame-shifting and improve compliance. To avoid conceptual overbreadth, the article distinguishes direct oil-and-gas environmental incidents from air-pollution and climate-related harms, using the latter only where they illuminate the common problem of omission-based public accountability.

Highlights

· Defines “public liability” and “administrative accountability” in the context of environmental and climate-related incidents in Iran’s oil and gas sector, emphasizing regulatory omission and supervisory failure as primary pathways of fault.

· Maps the multi-agency governance structure involving the Department of Environment (DOE), Ministry of Petroleum, National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), and local authorities, and demonstrates how overlapping mandates can lead to delays, blame shifting, and enforcement gaps.

· Identifies the Court of Administrative Justice as a central mechanism for challenging refusals to perform statutory duties and for compelling corrective administrative action.

· Demonstrates why causation and attribution are particularly contested in cases involving chronic air pollution and climate-related risks, and explains why conventional tort-law mechanisms are often inadequate for addressing diffuse harms.

· Proposes a calibrated “public duty of care” standard to address accountability gaps arising from regulatory omissions while preserving legitimate administrative discretion.

Offers implementable reform measures, including binding coordination protocols, greater transparency of environmental data, strengthened standing to challenge administrative inaction, and independent oversight mechanisms to improve deterrence and remediation

Keywords

Public liability

Administrative accountability

Administrative omission

Iran&rsquo

s oil and gas sector

Public duty of care

Subjects

Law Studies

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