Iran executed at least 71 prisoners in July 2022

Iran-HRM – A recent wave of executions continued in July 2022 with at least 71 prisoners being hanged at Iran’s prisons.

According to the statistics collected by the Iran Human Rights Monitor, at least 31 prisoners were executed on drug charges, 34 were hanged on the charge of murder, four on the charge of rape, and two others on the charge of armed robbery. Four women are among those executed.

Iranian authorities also executed a man in public in Fars Province after a halt in public executions for two years.

Iran holds the world’s record with the highest number of per capita executions. It is also the world’s top executioner of women. The executions are carried out after grossly unfair trials.

Most of the women executed in Iran are themselves victims of domestic violence and commit murder in self-defense.

The actual number of executions and particularly the execution of women is higher as most of the executions are carried out in secret.

The Iranian regime has stepped up handing down death penalties and carrying them out since Ebrahim Raisi took office as the regime’s president.

They have escalated crackdown to stifle the society which has been furious with soaring prices and spreading hunger and poverty.

Iran’s dark record of executions

Iran HRM has registered more than 350 executions in eight months after Ebrahim Raisi took office as the regime’s president, a 25% increase compared to last year.

The rise in executions began after Ebrahim Raisi, took office as president last year and the Supreme Leader appointed a former Minister of Intelligence, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, as the new head of the judiciary on July 1, 2021.

Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, a major human rights violator has a dark record in suppressing peaceful protests, fabricating cases against human rights and political activists, and executions in Iran.

At least 554 death sentences were carried out in more than one year since he took office.

International reactions to the horrific wave of executions in Iran

A May 24 Amnesty International report noted the Iranian regime’s shocking record in carrying out death penalties. Amnesty International said Iran executed at least 314 people (up from at least 246 in 2020), their highest number of executions since 2017, reversing year-on-year declines since then. According to the Amnesty International report, 14 women were among those executed in Iran in 2021. The report states that the global number of executions in 2021 increased by about 20% compared to the previous year.

According to a report by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that was presented on June 21, Iran executed more than 100 people in the first three months of 2022, continuing a worrying upward trend.

Speaking before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, U.N. deputy human rights chief Nada Al-Nashif presented Guterres’ latest report on Iran, decrying that executions in the country were on the rise.

The Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre for Human Rights in Iran and Amnesty International said on July 27, that the Iranian authorities have embarked on an execution spree, killing at least 251 people between 1 January and 30 June 2022.

The organizations warned that if executions continue at this horrifying pace, they will soon surpass the total of 314 executions recorded for the whole of 2021.

Iran Human Rights Monitor calls on the United Nations and all human rights authorities, as well as the European Union and its member states, to condemn the executions in Iran and to take immediate action to save the lives of thousands of Iranian prisoners on death row. It also calls for the regime’s dossier of systematic human rights violations to be referred to the Security Council and to bring the regime to justice for four decades of crimes against humanity.