At least 901 people were reportedly executed in Iran last year, including about 40 in one week in December, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“It is very disturbing that we are once again witnessing an increase in the number of people subjected to the death penalty in Iran on an annual basis,” Volker Türk said. “It is time for Iran to stop this rising tide of executions.”
This total is the highest recorded in nine years and represents a 6% increase from 2023, when 853 people were executed.
Most of the executions were for drug-related crimes, but opponents and people linked to the 2022 protests were also executed, according to the United Nations. There was also a rise in the number of women executed.
Türk urged the Iranian authorities to halt all further executions and halt the use of the death penalty with a view to eventually abolishing it.
“The death penalty contravenes the fundamental right to life and raises an unacceptable risk of innocent people being executed. To be clear, it can never be imposed for conduct protected by international human rights law,” he warned.
A spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office told reporters that its numbers came from several organizations it considered reliable, including the Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR), and Hengaw.
on monday, Norway-based IHR said in a report At least 31 women will be executed during 2024 – the highest number since death penalty monitoring began 17 years ago.
According to the report, nineteen of them were sentenced to death after being convicted of murder. Among them was Leila Ghaemi, who IHR said strangled her husband after she returned home one day to find him and his friends raping her young daughter.
The other 12 women were convicted of drug-related crimes. Among them was Parvin Mousavi, who IHR said was the breadwinner for her family and was paid about 15 euros ($15.60) to transport what she was told was medication, but turned out to be 5kg of morphine.
Activists say drug crimes fall short of the “most serious crimes” for which the death penalty should be limited under international law.
Separate report from HengawA Kurdish human rights organization said that more than half of those executed last year were from ethnic minorities in Iran, including 183 Kurds.
The United Nations 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 nationwide “Women, Life, Freedom” protests broke out in response to the death of a prisoner. During his detention. A young Kurdish woman was arrested by the morality police for not wearing the “appropriate” hijab.
Meanwhile, Hrana reported that it documented the execution of five juvenile offenders. International law prohibits the use of the death penalty in all cases where the accused was under 18 years of age at the time of the alleged crime.
Iran carried out 74% of all executions recorded worldwide in 2023, according to Amnesty International.
These figures excluded China, which Amnesty International said was believed to execute thousands of people every year, but data on the death penalty was confidential.
