Iran executed a record 1,000 people in 2024, almost 70 per cent of them after its new “reformist” president took office.
The killings, the most in Iran in 30 years, took place across 86 prisons and those executed included 34 women and seven juveniles.
Some 695 of them came after Masoud Pezeshkian, a wild card candidate who was thought to be more progressive, took over in August.
The total is a significant increase on the 853 recorded in 2023, but the true figure may be even higher, because of Iran’s secretive judicial system.
The identities of many executed prisoners often remain unrecorded, meaning some people simply “disappear” following their arrest.
There was a notable drop in executions during February’s parliamentary elections and June’s presidential elections, when there were eight and 22 respectively, compared to a high of 170 in October.
Masoud Pezeshkian greets Vladimir Putin at the BRICS summit in Russia in October – Maxim Shemetov/Pool Photo via AP
In August, as the executions ramped up following the start of Mr Pezeshkian’s first term, 87 executions were reported, including 29 in one day.
On Oct 9, Mr Pezeshkian defended the country’s executions, stating: “Those who talk about human rights ask why we execute murderers.”
Research collated by teams inside and outside Iran by the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) found that half of the prisoners were hanged in eight prisons: 165 in Qezelhessar, 97 in Shiraz, 61 in Isfahan, 59 in Tabriz, 44 in Central Karaj, 38 in Qazvin, 33 in Mashhad, and 29 in Birjand.
Among the executed in 2024 were 119 Baluch citizens. The nomadic Baluchis, who make up five per cent of the population, represented 20 per cent of last year’s executions.
Protesters rallied in London in December to highlight Iran’s brutal detention and execution of political prisoners – imageplotter/Alamy Live News
In 2023, Javid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, called the levels of killings, torture, and brutality against the mostly Sunni Baluch minority in Iran “shocking”.
He said that more than half the total number of people that were killed since the start of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022 were from the Baluchi and Kurdish-populated provinces.
“Children from Iran’s Baluch and Kurdish provinces constituted at least 63 per cent of the recorded victims of the protest,” Mr Rehman said.
In last year’s executions, the average age of 491 victims whose details were documented was 36, while more than half the victims (502) were executed on drug-related charges.
This is despite the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its mafia networks controlling major drug trafficking operations worth billions globally.
The Islamic Republic has long made extensive use of the death penalty and brutal corporal punishment such as amputating fingers and eye gouging.
Its use escalated in the wake of the 2022 uprising, which followed the death of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. She had been held for failing to wear a hijab correctly.
A demonstrator displays placards of some of the victims of the Islamic Republic’s notorious Revolutionary Guard at the protest in London in December – imageplotter/Alamy Live News
Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the NCRI said: “The brutal wave of executions in 2024, especially in the autumn, is [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei’s desperate attempt to prevent the uprising of an angry populace who will settle for nothing less than the regime’s complete overthrow.
“These medieval crimes, however, double the resolve of Iran’s youth to topple the religious dictatorship. Silence and inaction in the face of such savage executions not only trample on recognised human rights principles but also embolden the regime to continue its executions, terrorism, war-mongering and pursuit of nuclear weapons.’
Nahid Naghshbandi, Amnesty International’s Iran researcher, said: “The Iranian authorities are carrying out an egregious execution spree while trumpeting their recent presidential elections as evidence of genuine change.
“For those campaign slogans to be meaningful, Iran’s new president should urgently intervene to overturn existing death sentences, place a moratorium on capital punishment, and take steps to reform the judiciary.”
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