Every Tuesday, Iranians gather—online, in diaspora communities, in whispered conversations inside the country—to say the one thing the Islamic Republic fears most: No to execution. It is a phrase that has become both a rallying cry and a plea for help. The No to Execution Tuesdays campaign is not a slogan; it is a weekly act of resistance against a state that has turned execution into a tool of political governance.

It began in January 2024, when political prisoners at Ghezel Hesar prison in Karaj, west of Tehran, started a hunger strike every Tuesday. Prisoners in dozens of other prisons have since joined.

Iran’s political prisoners are not anonymous. They are teachers, students, labor organizers, artists, and ordinary citizens who dared to imagine a different future. Many were swept up during the nationwide protests of 2022 and January 2026, which erupted after decades of repression. Their trials are often minutes long. Their “confessions” are extracted under torture. Their sentences—death by hanging—are carried out at dawn.

The campaign’s purpose is painfully clear: to stop the next execution before it happens.

Why Tuesdays Matter

The Islamic Republic has long relied on executions to silence dissent, but the pace has accelerated dramatically since the 2022 uprising. Human‑rights organizations report that death row prisoners are typically moved to solitary confinement on Tuesdays, a sign that execution is imminent. Tuesdays have become the day when families wait for news, when activists scramble to raise awareness, and when the world has a chance—however small—to intervene.

The campaign forces a question that governments often avoid:

How many political prisoners must die before the world acknowledges that silence is complicity?

The Prisoners Behind the Hashtag

The names change each week, but the stories do not. A Kurdish activist sentenced for “enmity against God.” A young protester accused of burning a government banner. A journalist charged with “propaganda against the state.” Their cases rarely make it into Western media, and the regime counts on that silence.

By amplifying these names every Tuesday, activists are doing what the international community has failed to do: treat political prisoners as human beings whose lives matter.

The International Community’s Moral Test

Governments often claim that human‑rights concerns must be “balanced” against geopolitical interests. But there is no balance when a state is executing its own citizens for demanding basic freedoms. The No to Execution Tuesdays campaign exposes the absurdity of pretending otherwise.

International pressure has stopped executions in Iran before. It can do so again. But only if the world pays attention.

A weekly campaign may seem small compared to the machinery of a repressive state. Yet history shows that sustained global attention—especially when tied to specific names and imminent threats—can force even the most entrenched regimes to pause.

Tuesday Is Here

Somewhere in Iran, a political prisoner is waiting—perhaps in solitary confinement, perhaps already moved to a “death row” ward. Their family is bracing for a phone call. Their lawyer has been denied access. Their name may not yet be known outside the prison walls. The No to Execution Tuesdays campaign exists so that the world cannot say it did not know. The question now is whether the world will choose to care.

David M. Crane was the founding chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the UN-backed tribunal that indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor in 2003. A retired US Army lieutenant colonel, he also held senior intelligence oversight posts in the US government, taught at Syracuse University College of Law, and founded the Global Accountability Network.