A new joint report from Iran Human Rights and ECPM says Iranian authorities executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, a 68 percent increase from the 975 reported in 2024. The groups say this is the highest known total since 1989 and stress that the figure is an absolute minimum, since many executions are never officially announced.
The scale is staggering. The report’s total works out to more than four executions per day on average. It also says 48 women were executed in 2025, the highest number recorded in more than two decades.
Human rights groups warn that the death penalty in Iran is not functioning only as criminal punishment, but as a broader instrument of fear, repression, and political control. That warning comes amid mass arrests, protest crackdowns, and reports that hundreds of detainees remain at risk of death sentences following protests that intensified in late December 2025 and January 2026.
Human Rights Watch says Iran’s human rights situation “spiraled further into crisis” in 2025, citing the highest number of known executions in decades along with mass arbitrary arrests and intensified repression of dissidents, women, and ethnic and religious minorities. It also says Iran continues to impose death sentences after grossly unfair trials, including for drug-related offenses and broadly defined national security crimes that do not meet the international standard of the “most serious crimes.”
Particularly troubling is the report’s claim that ethnic minorities, especially Kurds and Baluch, are disproportionately represented among those executed. Nearly half of all executions were reportedly tied to drug-related charges, which rights advocates argue are often used within a judicial system lacking transparency and due process.
This is not only an Iranian story. It is a human story. When a government normalizes execution at this scale, it sends a message that fear is more valuable than justice, and obedience more important than human dignity.
Whatever one’s politics, the moral question remains the same: What kind of world are we building when the machinery of death becomes ordinary?
At a time when the world is flooded with war, propaganda, and division, the value of human life must not become negotiable. The silence of the international community can become its own form of permission.
Closing reflection
Justice without mercy becomes terror.
Law without truth becomes control.
And when death is used to govern the living, the whole human family is diminished.
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