Shadows of an Iranian policeman and a noose are seen on the ground before an execution, south of Tehran. Iran. REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl

A surge of executions in Iran has prompted protests and serious concerns at the sudden increase in the country’s use of the death penalty.

Iran has recently engaged in a spree of executions, including 29 killings in one day. The development has triggered protests in some of the country’s most notorious prisons. It’s also prompted warnings from international rights advocates that, due to a lack of legal guarantees or due process, dozens more could find themselves on death row.

Iran Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation that tracks the country’s use of capital punishment, says there’s been a surge of over 100 executions in August, bringing the total in the first eight months of the year to 418, a significant increase on 2023. Rights groups suggest that if this continues Iran will earn the dubious title of ‘world’s worst executioner’.

Of the executions carried out in August, 46 were for drug-related charges, 50 for murder, three for rape and one for moharebeh (enmity against God). New York-based Human Rights Watch reported that there were 29 executions in one day in August. Iran also undertook the first public execution this year: hanging 21-year-old man Amirreza Ajam Akrami in the city of Shahroud.

‘I don't think any country has such persistence when it comes to the use of the death penalty’, says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, Director of Iran Human Rights.

Anne Ramberg, Co-Chair of the IBA Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) and Immediate Past Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association, says ‘clearly, the death penalty is being used as a tool of repression to create fear and to attempt to silence, protestors and dissidents’. ‘We condemn unreservedly death sentences and executions and demand the abolition of both in Iran’, she added.

Iranian anger at UN

In July, the outgoing Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Javaid Rehman, issued a scathing report alleging that Iranian officials had committed some of ‘the worst and the most egregious human rights abuses of our living memory’ since coming to office after the Islamic revolution in 1979, particularly in the early 1980s. In the report, Rehman argues that such crimes are tantamount to ‘crimes against humanity and genocide against the nationals of their own state’.

The report noted that the same rationale used during the inception of the Iranian revolution was still responsible for Iran’s patchy legal record, particularly the broad use of national security offences such moharebeh and efsad-e fel-arz (spreading corruption on Earth) – two terms with religious connotations that are particular to the ruling Iranian mullahs.

The report prompted an angry reaction in Iran, with Iranian officials going as far as accusing Rehman of complicity in terrorism after he attended a meeting of the Iranian opposition group, Mojahedeen-e Khalq Organization (MKO), in Paris. Kazem Gharibabadi, Secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, said Rehman's report was ‘full of lies and baseless accusations’. Rehman, in a statement from September, said that on the contrary, he conducted his job away from politics.

‘I am greatly honoured to have served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran […] I have worked on the UN mandate on a completely unpaid basis […] I have served the people of Iran with great integrity.’ Rehman added that he has ‘acted in an independent capacity, completely impartially, professionally and free from any politicizations’ and that he ‘played an important role in highlighting and reporting human rights violations’ in Iran.

Crushing protests

Iran’s increased use of the death penalty has drawn criticism both internally and internationally. The execution of Reza Rasaei in August was one example of the abuse of the capital punishment system in Iran, critics say, especially for political purposes. In 2022, widespread protests took place in response to the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 after the 22-year-old woman died while in police custody. The demonstrations, which represented one of the most serious challenges to the regime’s rule in decades, were met with an iron fist.

The official crackdown resulted in the death of more than 500 protestors, according to rights groups. It is estimated that almost 20,000 protesters were arrested, with over 2,000 officially charged. Many were convicted under the moharebeh (war against God) and efsad-e fel-arz (spreading corruption on Earth) – charges that routinely carry the death sentence.

Rights advocates say the trials were a deliberate plan to use the maximum punishment to crush the nascent political movement that called for greater freedoms, named the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement.

Rasaei, a 34-year-old Kurdish activist, was among those detained and sentenced to death. Iranian prosecutors say Rasaei was convicted of complicity in the ‘premeditated murder’ of Nader Birami, head of the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The death penalty was confirmed in October last year after the Supreme Court denied Rasaei’s appeal for a retrial. He was executed among 29 people in August.

His death triggered protests by political prisoners, a move that took Iranian jailers by surprise, according to the families and lawyers of political prisoners. One of the protests was staged by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and other female prisoners who chanted slogans against the death penalty. The protestors were beaten by jail guards and Mohammadi, who is serving a sentence of over 13 years, was injured, prompting her family, in exile in Paris, to issue a statement in which they said they were ‘deeply worried about her health and wellbeing’. She had won the Nobel Prize in 2023 for campaigning for human rights and freedom from the cruelty of the death penalty.

Mai Sato, the newly appointed Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, started her duties in August. She has criticised the prison crackdown and said she was concerned for the health of incarcerated human rights defenders, including Mohammadi, Fatemeh Sepehri, Mahmoud Mehrabi, Davood Razavi, Hasan Saeedi and Reza Shahabi Zakaria.

Several UN human rights experts have issued a statement in support saying they too were alarmed by Iran's denial of healthcare to Mohammadi and other detainees despite repeated appeals. ‘Such deprivations may amount to torture and inhuman treatment, which is an absolute right not liable to exceptions and derogations, and a jus cogens norm of international human rights law’, they say.

Iran described what happened as nothing but ‘media hype’, a ‘prison riot’ and an event that was ‘contained peacefully’. The Iranian News Agency (IRNA), a source for official positions in the country’s tightly controlled media environment, says the incident took place on 6 August. ‘Mohammadi incited other inmates’ to initiate an assault on the head of the guards, prisoners then attempted an escape and only two suffered minor medical issues, according to the IRNA.

China’s bad, Iran’s worse

Rights groups say what happened is part of a long history of abuse by the Iranian regime where there is a lack of legal guarantees of fair trials and the humane treatment of prisoners. Human Rights Watch says it has long documented ‘serious due process violations and unfair trials in Iranian courts’. Others blame the Iranian judicial system for failing to meet safeguards required by international human rights law, while defendants themselves often complain of a lack of access to lawyers, denial of the right to phone calls and lengthy jail sentences driven by trumped up accusations and coerced confessions.

Tehran denies all of this and argues that defendants in Iranian courts are tried – and potentially executed – only for serious crimes related to ‘premeditated murder’, ‘drug-related charges’ and for ‘rape’ in fair and transparent trials.

The numbers tell a worrying story though. Iran executed at least 853 people in 2023, the highest figure in seven years, making the country responsible for 74 per cent of all recorded executions worldwide, according to Amnesty International. The UN says that, in 2022, 582 people were executed, a 75 per cent increase from the previous year, which saw 333 executions.

Over the past 14 years, there has been a total of more than 7,830 executions in Iran, according to Iran Human Rights. ‘That is one to two executions every single day’, says Amiry-Moghaddam.

China is known to be worse than Iran in terms of the total number of executions, but in another sense, Iran could be said to be the worst in the world. ‘The number of executions in China is a state secret, but it is believed to be a few thousands. Nonetheless, it seems that Iran is the country with the highest number of executions per capita’, Amiry-Moghaddam says, referring to the latest statistics.

Black Tuesdays

In response to the spike in executions in August, 68 rights organisations issued a joint statement condemning the use of the death penalty as an instrument of political repression. Death sentences were issued ‘after unfair trials without the minimal standards of due process’, the statement says.

The groups said Iranian prisons were witnessing a rising movement of protests against the killings, now dubbed ‘Black Tuesdays’ to mark the day when executions routinely take place. Every Tuesday, political prisoners show disapproval through hunger strikes, group chants and by calling out the names of abusers. In the statement, the groups called for an immediate halt to all executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty in Iran altogether and urged the international community to back the growing abolition movement in Iran.

The IBAHRI has previously condemned the mass use of the death penalty in Iran and ‘opposes the inhuman and cruel punishment of the death penalty in all circumstances’.

Iran, like many countries intolerant of political dissent, has used concerns for national security as a means to justify its use of the death penalty, but critics say such reasoning is nothing more than a smokescreen for stamping out political opposition.

Richard Goldstone, Honorary President of the IBAHRI, tells Global Insight that Iran was evidently using the death penalty as retribution for political activism. ‘Clearly this use of the death sentence is calculated to intimidate freedom of expression and political activism’, he says. ‘This is a political excuse and there can be no doubt that the death sentence is calculated to instil fear in those who oppose the autocratic regime.’

Legal experts say that while the punishment is not prohibited by international law, it is not encouraged. In fact, the penalty has fallen out of favour steadily over the past three decades. Iran itself is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which enshrines the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and the right to life and to a fair trial.

‘The death penalty is not prohibited by international law. However, it is certainly not supported’, explained Goldstone. ‘Article 6 of the ICCPR (1966) permits the use of the death penalty in limited circumstances. It also provides that “nothing in this article shall be invoked to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment by any State Party to the present Covenant”.’

Iran’s response

Through its state-run media, the Iranian government responds routinely to the criticism it receives as ‘hostile’, ‘biased’ and ‘politically motivated’. Officials often say such accusations come from ‘Zionist’ and ‘American’ campaigners who have an animus with Tehran over its role in the Middle East, particularly in relation to Palestine. Then-Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Nasser Kanaani repeatedly said human rights was a cover used by Western institutions for deceptive propaganda. He tweeted on 10 September that those who claim to be champions of human rights, have contributed to the genocide and war crimes in Gaza by supplying lethal weapons to the Israeli regime over the past eleven months.

But both exiled Iranian dissidents and international rights groups say it is the Iranian regime that is using the Palestinian issue to distract from atrocities and repression inside its own country. ‘They use the death penalty to stay in power’, says Amiry-Moghaddam. ‘I think it is the same for all dictators. The death penalty never gives a sense of security to the citizens, it just creates fear.’

He says his organisation’s analysis of execution trends in Iran shows a direct relationship between the number of executions and political events. ‘When authorities fear protests, or right after protests, the numbers increase and when the authorities want to encourage people to participate in elections – to show that they have legitimacy – or when they are under scrutiny, the numbers (of executions) drop’, he says. ‘This is the trend we have seen since 2007. So, even if most of the people executed are sentenced to death with criminal (non-political) charges, the aim is to create fear in the society in order to prevent protests, because the death penalty is the strongest tool of political suppression.’

Calls for immediate reform

Abolitionist supporters, who oppose the death penalty because of its inherent cruelty, have urged Iran to stop escalating the use of the death penalty and spare lives. Among their demands is an immediate reform of the country’s judiciary because of the country’s notorious absence of separation of powers.

Giada Girelli, senior analyst at Harm Reduction International, notes that Iran has so far faced few or no international consequences for its maximum punishment policy. ‘Despite some words of condemnation, mostly by UN human rights mechanisms, other actors – such as fellow governments and UNODC (the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) – are mostly silent’, she says. ‘The geopolitical context is also different, meaning the death penalty may simply not be a priority in the diplomacy with Iran. All this implicitly sends a signal to Iran that executions can continue, with no political consequences.’

In his report, Rehman called upon the international community to establish an investigative and accountability mechanism to probe crimes under international law with a view to future criminal prosecution of perpetrators in Iran. He says the mechanism should examine what he called ‘atrocity crimes’, including ‘summary, arbitrary and extra-judicial executions’.

Rehman has called for an investigative and accountability mechanism, which would investigate and examine all the available evidence and make it available to be used for future criminal prosecutions of the perpetrators of international crimes.

Amiry-Moghaddam says the international community needs to ratchet up its campaign against the death penalty. ‘The only means that can be used is naming and shaming these regimes that still use the death sentence and, if possible, for sanctions to be imposed on those governments that use the death sentence to intimidate its citizens into compliance’, he says.

Emad Mekay is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at emad.mekay@int-bar.org.