At least 901 people were reportedly executed in Iran last year, including about 40 in one week in December, according to the UN human rights chief.
“It is deeply disturbing that we are once again seeing an increase in the number of people put to death in Iran year after year,” Volker Türk said. “It is high time for Iran to stop this ever-increasing wave of executions.”
The total was the highest recorded in nine years and marked a 6% increase from 2023, when 853 people were executed.
Most of the executions were for drug-related offences, but dissidents and people linked to the 2022 protests were also executed, according to the UN. The number of executed women also increased.
Turk called on the Iranian authorities to halt all further executions and impose a moratorium on the use of the death penalty with a view to its eventual abolition.
“The death penalty is incompatible with the fundamental right to life and increases the unacceptable risk of innocent people being executed. And, to be clear, it can never be imposed for conduct that is protected by international human rights law,” he warned.
A spokeswoman for the UN human rights office told reporters that its data came from several organizations it believed to be reliable, including the Iran Human Rights Activists Information Agency (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Hengaw.
on Monday, Norway-based IHR said in a report that at least 31 women were executed in 2024. – the highest number since monitoring of the death penalty began 17 years ago.
Nineteen of them were sentenced to death after being convicted of murder, according to the report. They include Leila Ghaemi, who the IHR said strangled her husband after coming home one day to find him and his friends raping her young daughter.
The remaining 12 women were convicted of drug-related offences. Among them was Parveen Mousavi, who the IHR said fed her family and was paid around 15 euros ($15.60) to transport what she was told was medicine but turned out to be 5kg of morphine .
Activists say drug-related crimes do not meet the threshold of the “most serious crimes” to which the death penalty should be limited under international law.
Separate report from Hengawa Kurdish rights group, said more than half of those executed last year were from Iran's ethnic minorities, including 183 Kurds.
The United Nations' mission of fact-finding 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 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests erupted in response to the death in custody of a young Kurdish woman , detained by the morality police for not wearing an “appropriate” hijab.
Meanwhile, HRANA reported that it had documented the execution of five juvenile criminals. International law prohibits the use of the death penalty in all cases where the accused was under 18 at the time of the alleged crime.
Iran accounted for 74% of all recorded executions worldwide in 2023, according to human rights group Amnesty International.
These figures exclude China, which Amnesty says is believed to execute thousands of people each year, but where death penalty figures are classified.