Iran execution rate doubles in 2025: NGO

In the first three months of 2025, at least 230 people, including eight women, were executed. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The number of executions carried out by Iran in the first three months this year was more than double the figure from the same period last year, an NGO said on Friday (April 4, 2025).

Norway-based group Iran Human Rights warned that the Islamic republic’s use of capital punishment was again surging in a time of international tension.

In the first three months of 2025, at least 230 people, including eight women, were executed, mainly on murder and drugs-related charges, it said. In the same period of 2024, 110 executions were recorded.

The NGO said there were five women among the 59 people executed in March alone, including a 24-year-old woman hanged on charges of killing her fiance whom she had been forced to marry.

IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam warned that Iran could exploit concerns over a potential conflict with the United States, which has not ruled out military action against its nuclear programme, to carry out more executions.

“The risk of a significant increase in executions in the coming weeks is serious. The Iranian authorities may, as in the past, exploit public attention on tensions between Iran and the United States to carry out more executions, including those of political prisoners,” he said.

According to IHR, Iran executed at least 975 people last year, the highest figure since the NGO began recording executions in Iran in 2008.

Human rights groups, who say that Iran is the world’s most prolific executioner after China, accuse the authorities of using the death penalty to sow fear among the public, particularly after nationwide protests broke out in 2022.

The numbers of women executed has also been soaring with 31 hanged in 2024, also the highest figure for the past 17 years, according to IHR. Many are convicted of killing abusive partners or husbands who they were forced to marry.

In the latest such case, Mahnaz Kakayi, 24, arrested for the murder of her fiance over four years and seven months ago, was hanged in the central city of Isfahan on March 29, IHR said.

“Her father insisted she marry a man of his choosing. Mahnaz didn’t want to marry him and was accused of killing him with a knife during an argument before they married,” a source, which was not named, told the NGO.