By Joshua Tosin Ogunsakin 
Iranian authorities executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 and now risk hanging more in the wake of the war against the US and Israel, two NGOs said Monday, urging the West to put capital punishment “at the heart” of any negotiations with Tehran.
The number of executions represented an increase of 68 percent on the 975 people Iran put to death in 2024, and also included 48 women, Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) said in their joint annual report.
If the Islamic Republic “survives the current crisis, there is a serious risk that executions will be used even more extensively as a tool of oppression and repression”, the report said.
IHR — which requires two sources to confirm an execution, the majority of which are not reported in Iranian official media — said the figure represented an “absolute minimum” for the number of hangings in 2025.
The report said the number of executions was by far the highest since IHR began tracking it in 2008, and was the most reported since 1989, in the earlier years of the Islamic revolution.
Raphael Chenuil-Hazan, executive director of ECPM, said the question of abolition of the death penalty needed to be “at the heart” of any talks between Iran and the West on ending the conflict that is currently on hold with a ceasefire.
“Be strong, put the death penalty in all the deals,” he told reporters at a news conference in Paris, adding that the “reality is the same” even after more than five weeks of war that saw the killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam lamented that after US-Iran talks in Islamabad at the weekend that failed to agree on a breakthrough, there was “no mention of the Iranian people’s rights in any of those negotiations”.
A moratorium on the use of the death penalty and the release of all political prisoners must be “demand number one” in talks, he said.
– World’s top executioner? –
The report also warned that “hundreds of detained protesters remain at risk of death sentences and execution” after being charged with capital crimes over January 2026 protests against the authorities — quashed by a crackdown that rights groups say left thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested.
Even during the war, Iran hanged seven people in connection with the January protests, another six men convicted of membership in the banned opposition group People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), and one dual Iranian-Swedish citizen charged with spying for Israel.
Amiry-Moghaddam said that death sentences have been issued against at least 26 other people arrested over the January protests, “but several hundred more” are facing charges that could see them executed.
“The message they send by executing people every day is to say ‘we have the power to kill’,” he added.
In 2025, at least 48 women were executed, the highest number recorded in more than 20 years and a 55 percent increase from 2024 when 31 women were hanged, according to the NGOs.
Of these, 21 were executed for murdering their husbands or fiancés, the report said.
Almost all hangings were carried out inside prisons, but public hangings more than tripled to 11 in 2025, the report said.
Almost half of those executed were convicted of drug-related offences, the report said.
Rights groups, including Amnesty International, say Iran carries out the most executions of any nation worldwide per capita, and the most of any country other than China, for which no reliable data is available.
Amiry-Moghaddam said there were more than 500 other possible cases of executions in 2025 that were not included in the report as they could not be conclusively sourced. Compiling the figures has also been complicated by the internet blackout imposed by the authorities during the January protests and the war, he added.
Chenuil-Hazan added that this could mean Iran has “perhaps” now even overtaken China as the world’s top executioner.
AFP