Rights Groups Warn Of Iran’s Execution Spree In 2022
Two human rights organizations say Iran has embarked on an execution spree at a “horrifying pace” with at least 251 cases between January 1 and June 30, 2022.
Two human rights organizations say Iran has embarked on an execution spree at a “horrifying pace” with at least 251 cases between January 1 and June 30, 2022.
Amnesty International and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran said in a report on Wednesday that the actual number is likely higher, as authorities keep secret figures on death sentences passed and executed.
The rights organizations compiled the figure from a variety of sources, including prisoners, relatives of those executed, human rights defenders, journalists, and reports by state media as well as independent media outlets and human rights organizations.
They warned that if executions continue at this pace, they will soon surpass the total of 314 executions recorded for the whole of 2021, according to Amnesty’s data.
At least 86 people were executed for drug-related offenses that do not carry the death penalty under international law, including many members of the Baluchi ethnicity, a minority people living in Iran’s south-east bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Most of those executed in 2022 – 146 -- had been convicted of murder with well-documented patterns of executions being systematically carried out following “grossly unfair trials.”
“During the first six months of 2022, the Iranian authorities executed at least one person a day on average. The state machinery is carrying out killings on a mass scale across the country in an abhorrent assault on the right to life, said the deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, Diana Eltahawy. She added that "Iran’s staggering execution toll for the first half of this year has chilling echoes of 2015 when there was another shocking spike.”
Executive Director of Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, Roya Boroumand, called on the Iranian authorities to immediately establish an official moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty completely, saying, “The renewed surge in executions, including in public, shows yet again just how out of step Iran is with the rest of the world, with 144 countries having rejected the death penalty in law or practice.”
On 23 July, the Islamic Republic also executed one man in public in southwestern Fars province, after a halt in public executions for about two years during the covid-19 pandemic.
On June 16, UN Secretary General António Guterres released a report on the situation of human rights in Iran, decrying “the high number of death penalty sentences and executions” and “reports of death in prison due to denial of adequate and timely medical care.”
The UN chief said that the number of executions in Iran increased from at least 260 cases in 2020 to 310 individuals in 2021, and the number continued to rise into 2022.
