Iran executed 72 people in first nine days of October, rights group says

The Washington-based group told Iran International that the executions this month included 38 for drug-related offenses, 26 for murder, seven on political charges and one for a sexual crime.

“What is going on behind the closed doors of Iran’s prisons, summary and arbitrary executions whose details are deliberately hidden from the public, is nothing short of mass killing,” Roya Boroumand, the center’s executive director told Iran International.

“These are not acts of justice or crime prevention but the desperate violence of a state that has lost the consent of its people,” she added.

Rights groups, including Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights, have documented that executions in Iran disproportionately affect members of ethnic minorities.

Of the seven people executed on political charges this month, six were from the Arab minority and one from the Kurdish minority.

In late September, Amnesty International said that in less than nine months, the number of people executed by Iranian authorities this year has already surpassed last year’s total of 972, marking the highest annual figure recorded by the group in at least 15 years.

Last week, Mai Sato, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, said 11 people have been executed on alleged espionage charges this year, with nine carried out after Israel’s military strikes on Iran on June 13.

The surge in executions comes as Iran’s Guardian Council approved a new espionage law expanding the definition of spying and increasing penalties, including the death sentence, for cooperation with foreign governments or media deemed hostile.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf formally notified President Masoud Pezeshkian of the legislation earlier this week, marking its final approval and paving the way for it to take effect, raising concerns over a further expansion of the death penalty and a potential rise in executions under the new law.