Iran executed at least 1,500 people in 2025, a 35-year record: Rights group

PARIS - Iran executed at least 1,500 people in 2025, said the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group on Jan 1, in what it called an “unprecedented” hike in the use of capital punishment.

“It is very alarming,” the group’s director, Professor Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, said of the provisional toll.

“It is unprecedented in the last 35 years. As long as Iran Human Rights has existed, we have never had such numbers.”

In 2024, Iran executed at least 975 people, according to IHR and French group Together Against the Death Penalty, known as ECPM.

While IHR has yet to release its final tally for 2025, it said it had verified at least 1,500 people killed – of whom more than 700 were executed for drug-related offences.

Prof Amiry-Moghaddam said the number of executions had shot up ever since protests that erupted in September 2022, which were sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini
, an Iranian-Kurdish woman arrested for an alleged breach of the country’s mandatory dress code.

Executions rose from more than 500 in 2022, to more than 800 in 2023, then 975 in 2024 and at least 1,500 in 2025, he said.

The new tally comes several days into new protests in Iran
, driven by dissatisfaction at the country’s economic stagnation.

Protesters and security forces clashed in south-western Iran on Jan 1, with demonstrators throwing stones in the city of Lordegan and police using tear gas to break them up, the Fars news agency reported.

“Iranian authorities use the death penalty as an instrument to create fear,” Prof Amiry-Moghaddam said.

“The aim of these executions has been to prevent new protests. But as you see, these days, they haven’t succeeded.”

The latest demonstrations have, however, not come close to the scale of the 2022 protests.