Article 111

Article 111 sits in Chapter VIII of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, revised in 1989. It specifies a fixed council of three — the President, the Chief Justice, and a jurist elected by the Guardian Council — to hold the Supreme Leader's powers collectively while the Assembly of Experts selects a permanent successor. The provision existed for 37 years without ever being used.

Article 111 was invoked for the first time in history on 1 March 2026, when Ali Khamenei's death triggered its provisions. Iran's remaining constitutional apparatus named a three-member transitional council: Ayatollah Alireza Arafi (Guardian Council jurist), Masoud Pezeshkian (President), and Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei (Chief Justice). Its authority was immediately contested: within days, Iran's foreign minister acknowledged military units acting outside central government direction.

The council's practical authority is its central unresolved question. Khamenei's funeral was postponed indefinitely, keeping the succession in legal limbo under Shia tradition. The IRGC ignored a direct Ceasefire order the council issued within days, and the named successor Mojtaba Khamenei had not appeared on video 13 days after being designated, with intelligence agencies seeking proof of life.

The succession's legal limbo began resolving in July: Khamenei's casket arrived in Tehran on 3 July for a state funeral running 4-9 July, finally allowing interment under Shia tradition and clearing the procedural obstacle to naming a permanent successor. Mojtaba Khamenei did not attend, having remained unseen in public since his March designation; Reuters reported on 5 July that he was disfigured and suffered a serious leg injury in the airstrike that killed his father. A common misreading holds that Article 111's successor must be a marja-e taqlid, a senior source-of-emulation cleric; the same 1989 amendment that created the article also removed that requirement, the change that let the elder Khamenei, then a mid-ranking cleric, take the post. The Assembly of Experts must still confirm any permanent successor against Article 109's looser criteria of scholarship, justice and political capability, a bar Mojtaba's continued invisibility makes harder to test.