Iran executed at least 1,500 people last year, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group said on Thursday, in what it called an “unprecedented” hike in the use of capital punishment.
“It is very alarming,” the group’s director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, said of the provisional toll.
“It is unprecedented in the last 35 years. As long as Iran Human Rights has existed, we have never had such numbers.”
In 2024, Iran executed at least 975 people, according to IHR and French group Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM).
While IHR has yet to release its final tally for 2025, it said it had verified at least 1,500 people killed — of whom more than 700 were executed for drug-related offences.
Amiry-Moghaddam said the number of executions had shot up ever since protests that erupted in September 2022, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman arrested for an alleged breach of the country’s mandatory dress code.
Executions rose from more than 500 in 2022 to more than 800 in 2023, then 975 in 2024 and at least 1,500 last year, he said.
The new tally comes several days into new protests in Iran, driven by dissatisfaction at the country’s economic stagnation.
Protesters and security forces clashed in southwestern Iran on Thursday, with demonstrators throwing stones in the city of Lordegan and police using tear gas to break them up, the Fars news agency reported.
“Iranian authorities use the death penalty as an instrument to create fear,” Amiry-Moghaddam said.
“The aim of these executions has been to prevent new protests. But as you see, these days, they haven’t succeeded.”
The latest demonstrations have however not come close to the scale of the 2022 protests.
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