Two European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) published a report this week that found Iran conducted 1,639 executions in 2025 — an increase of 68 percent over the previous year, and the largest number of executions since 1989.
The report was the latest edition of the “Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran” prepared by Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Together Against the Death Penalty (EPCM), which are based in Norway and France, respectively. The report has been produced every year since 2012.
The two groups are generally opposed to the death penalty, but find Iran’s practices to be particularly objectionable, as the Islamic regime is usually “ranked first worldwide in executions per capita” — it sometimes takes second place after China — and has a much lower threshold for capital punishment than most other nations.
In her forward to the report, human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh said the “worst form of execution” practiced by Iran are its political killings, which are often carried out at the behest of bloodthirsty pressure groups.
“This is precisely why death sentences should never be issued under the influence of public opinion,” she said.
Sotoudeh had a bad feeling that if the weakened Iranian regime falls, then “whichever group replaces the Islamic Republic may once again resort to widespread executions in order to consolidate its authority, thereby perpetuating this inhuman punishment.”
The Islamic Republic, of course, has been no slouch in the execution department, so its successor would need to shed a great deal of blood to catch up.
The data was compiled with the assistance of IHR members inside Iran, who slipped information past the regime’s firewalls and blackouts at great personal risk to themselves. Tehran is happy to admit to a large number of public executions, but it kills far more of its citizens than it admits.
IHR and EPCM found that Iran only took official responsibility for 113 executions last year, a mere seven percent of the total killings uncovered by researchers.
Almost half of the death sentences were handed down for drug-related offenses. The bulk of the remaining executions were qisas, a term in Islamic law that essentially means “retribution.” Qisas executions are demanded by the families of murder victims, and the execution is sometimes performed by aggrieved family members.
Human rights groups say qisas killings tend to be particularly brutal, often seeking to match the brutality of the original offense. Sometimes the condemned is able to escape death at the last minute by paying compensation to the victim’s family, a practice known as diyat.
The year 2025 set a 20-year record for the number of women executed in Iran, with 48 executions discovered by researchers – a 55-percent increase over 2024.
Relatively few of the executions in 2025 were for “armed rebellion,” “crimes against God,” or Iran’s other euphemisms for resistance to the regime, but since last year was a lull between the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests and January’s massive uprising, the numbers may look very different when the 2026 report is compiled. IHR and EPCM warned of this in a sobering forward that said their 2025 report was being “published at a time when the Iranian people were subjected to the largest mass killings of protesters in the Islamic Republic’s history.”
Still, almost half of the executions in 2025 were ordered by Iran’s “revolutionary courts,” which practice “grossly unfair trials” and have little patience for “due process.”
These revolutionary courts ordered so many executions for drug offenses last year that IHR/EPCM advised the United Nations to investigate them as crimes against humanity. Iranian courts have a tendency to hand down death sentences for even first-time drug offenders, and to execute everyone involved in a suspected drug trafficking conspiracy. If drugs are discovered on a property in Iran, the owner is probably going to see his life expectancy shrink dramatically, even if there is little evidence to suggest complicity in the drug scheme.
Another group opposed to the death penalty, Harm Reduction International (HRI), released a report on Wednesday that found executions for drug offenses reached an all-time high in 2025, “primarily driven by Iran and Saudi Arabia,” along with notable surges in Singapore and Vietnam. HRI found that drug-related executions made up over 46% of the worldwide total last year.
The Iran report noted that executions continued trending upward in 2025 despite the change from hardline Islamist President Ebrahim Raisi to his successor, the purportedly “moderate” Masoud Pezeshkian. In fact, Pezeshkian’s appointment was followed by a surge of executions that far exceeded anything under his three immediate predecessors.
The report concluded with a call for Iranian officials to stop imposing the death penalty, fix 18 years as the age of majority for both boys and girls, crack down on the practices of qisa and diyat, and cooperate more fully with the United Nations and other international monitors.
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