Problem Definition

By default, the Jira administrator cannot deactivate an account provisioned in the Internal Directory if the user is either a project or a component lead.

This operation is possible if the account is provisioned from an external user directory, such as external Crowd or LDAP, and the account is deactivated from source.
For example, when using external Crowd one can deactivate the account on Crowd and the change will be properly synchronized on Jira, no matter if the user is a project/component lead.

There are times that an administrator needs to deactivate the account without changing other configurations on projects.
It would be great to have an option to bypass this validation when deactivating a user account in the Internal Directory.

Suggested Solution

When deactivating an account, include an option to bypass the validation if the user is project/component lead.
This could be a checkbox on the UI and an additional parameter when using the REST API.