UN experts warn of surging executions in Iran News
Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
UN experts warn of surging executions in Iran

The Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council on Monday said that over 1,000 people have been executed in Iran in 2025, warning that this represents a dramatic escalation that violates international human rights law.  

The UN experts wrote: “With an average of more than nine hangings per day in recent weeks, Iran appears to be conducting executions at an industrial scale that defies all accepted standards of human rights protection.”  

A 2017 Amendment to Iran’s Anti-Narcotics Law abolished the death penalty for lower-level drug offenses and introduced a mechanism to limit capital punishment by commuting many death sentences to life imprisonment. Despite this, executions for drug-related offenses have steadily risen since 2020 and surged in 2024, which saw 503 drug-related executions—more than 50 percent of all executions in Iran that year.  

The experts also warned that drug-related executions in Iran disproportionately target minorities from marginalized and underdeveloped regions. Although constituting only 2-6 percent of Iran’s population, the Baluch ethnic minority accounted for at least 17 percent of drug-related executions in 2024.  

Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states that every human being has the inherent right to life, and establishes standards that limit capital punishment to the most serious crimes. As a state party to the ICCPR, Iran is bound by these standards, placing its continued use of the death penalty for drug-related offenses in direct tension with its international human rights commitments. 

Iran has recently been subjected to strict international scrutiny due to alleged breaches of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and other purported violations of human rights.  

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