At least 901 people were reportedly executed in Iran last year, including about 40 in one week in December, according to the UN human rights chief.
“It is deeply disturbing that year after year we again see an increase in the number of people who are subjected to the death penalty in Iran,” said Volker Türk. “It is high time for Iran to stem this rising tide of executions.”
The total number is the highest recorded in nine years and represents an increase of 6% compared to 2023, when 853 people were executed.
Most of the executions were for drug-related offences, but dissidents and people linked to the 2022 protests were also executed, according to the UN. There was also an increase in the number of executed women.
Türk called on the Iranian authorities to stop all further executions and put a moratorium on the use of the death penalty with the goal of its eventual abolition.
“The death penalty is incompatible with the fundamental right to life and increases the unacceptable risk of innocent people being executed. And, to be clear, it can never be imposed for conduct that is protected by international human rights law,” he warned.
A spokeswoman for the UN’s human rights office told reporters that its information came from several organizations it considers reliable, including Iran’s Human Rights News Agency (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Hengaw.
on Monday, Norway-based IHR states in the report that at least 31 women were executed during 2024 – the highest number since death penalty tracking began 17 years ago.
Nineteen of them were sentenced to death after being convicted of murder, the report said. Among them was Leila Ghaemi, who IHR said strangled her husband after coming home one day to find him and his friends raping her daughter.
The other 12 women were convicted of drug-related crimes. Among them was Parvin Mousavi, who IHR said was her family’s breadwinner and was paid about 15 euros ($15.60) to transport what she was told was medicine, but turned out to be 5 kg of morphine.
Activists say drug offenses do not meet the threshold of the “most serious crimes” to which the death penalty must be limited under international law,
Separate Hengaw reporta Kurdish human rights group, said more than half of those executed last year were members of Iran’s ethnic minorities, including 183 Kurds.
The UN’s fact-finding mission on Iran said in August that ethnic and religious minorities had been disproportionately affected by the government’s crackdown on dissent since 2022, when “Women, Life, Freedom” protests erupted across the country in response to the death in custody of a young Kurdish woman she was detained by the morality police for not wearing the “proper” hijab.
Meanwhile, HRANA reported that it had documented the execution of five juvenile criminals. International law prohibits the application of the death penalty in all cases where the accused was under the age of 18 at the time of the alleged crime.
Iran carried out 74% of all recorded executions in the world in 2023, according to the human rights group Amnesty International.
Those figures exclude China, which Amnesty says is thought to execute thousands of people each year, but where data on the death penalty is classified.
