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At least 901 people were reportedly killed in Iran last year, including about 40 in one week in December, according to the UN Human Rights chief.
“It is very disappointing that we are seeing the number of people sentenced to death in Iran every year,” said Volker Türk. “It’s time for Iran to end its rampant genocide.”
The number is the highest in nine years and represents an increase of 6% from 2023, when 853 people were killed.
Most of those killed were in drug-related crimes, but protesters and people linked to the 2022 protests were also killed, according to the UN. There was also a rise in the number of women killed.
Türk urged the Iranian authorities to stop all other killings and stop the killings in order to end the punishment.
“The death penalty is incompatible with the fundamental right to life and raises an unacceptable risk of killing innocent people. And, to be clear, it cannot be given for behavior that is protected under international law,” he warned.
A spokesperson for the UN human rights office told reporters that the figures came from several organizations it considers reliable, including Iran’s Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Hengaw.
On Monday, The Norwegian-based IHR said in a report that of at least 31 women were killed in 2024 – the highest number since the death penalty was introduced 17 years ago.
19 of them were sentenced to death after being found guilty of murder, according to reports. They included Leila Ghaemi, who the IHR said killed her husband after he came home one day to find him and his friends raping their daughter.
Another 12 women were found guilty of drug use. Among them was Parvin Mousavi, who the IHR said was his family’s breadwinner and was paid about €15 ($15.60) to carry what he said were drugs, but turned out to be 5kg of morphine.
Human rights activists say drug offenses do not meet the threshold of “serious crimes” for which the death penalty should be prohibited under international law,
A separate report from Hengawa Kurdish human rights group said more than half of those killed last year were from Iran’s ethnic minorities, including 183 Kurds.
A UN fact-finding mission on Iran said in August that ethnic and religious minorities have been the most affected by the government’s crackdown on tensions since 2022, when “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests broke out across the country in response to deaths in prison. A Kurdish girl who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing the “proper” hijab.
Meanwhile, HRANA said it had documented the killing of five juvenile delinquents. International law prohibits the use of capital punishment in all crimes where the accused was at least 18 years old at the time of the alleged offence.
Iran accounted for 74% of all the world’s executions in 2023, according to the human rights group Amnesty International.
The figures did not include China, which Amnesty said was responsible for thousands of executions each year, but where the death penalty figures were selected.
