Editor’s note: While the Stimson Center rarely publishes anonymous work, the author of this commentary is a Tehran-based analyst who has requested anonymity out of legitimate concern for their personal safety. The writer is known to appropriate staff, has a track record of reliable analysis, and is in a position to provide an otherwise unavailable perspective.
On December 10, 2023, when the family of Narges Mohammadi was in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace prize on her behalf, she was in Evin prison in Tehran on a hunger strike to protest the repression of followers of the Bahai faith.
Mohammadi was summoned to the women’s ward office, told that she would be tried for her recent activities in prison, and ultimately sentenced to 30 more months on top of the three years she had already served in a 31-year term.
Mohammadi, a co-founder of Defenders of Human Rights in Iran, is a prominent advocate for women’s and children’s rights and for the abolition of the death penalty in Iran. As the Islamic Republic marks its 45th anniversary on Feb. 11, 2024, she is among a number of Iranians who have received harsh new sentences for their efforts to bring world attention to escalating rights violations in Iran, including a record number of executions.
The regimes ruling Iran before and after the 1979 revolution have been authoritarian and harshly repressive. Thanks to satellite TV, internet, and social media, the Islamic Republic’s abuses are more widely known. Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, following the Hamas attack on Israel, the Iranian regime has intensified its crackdown, taking advantage of world attention focused elsewhere. This includes 127 executions from Oct. 7, 2023, to the end of last year.
The death penalty has been applied for drug trafficking, murder, apostasy, same-sex sexual conduct and adultery. Iran has one of the highest rates of execution in the world. According to Amnesty International, Iran executed at least 246 people in 2020, and “at least 333” in 2021. In 2022, the Deputy High Commissioner of the UN human rights office reported 582 confirmed executions. In the first ten months of 2023, the number reached more than 600, an eight-year record.
The practice continues. On Jan. 23, 2024, Mohammad Ghobadlou, a 23-year-old suffering from bipolar disorder, was executed for his participation in 2022 protests against enforced veiling. He was charged with killing a policeman, but his “confession” was extracted during torture, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a U.S.-based nonprofit. Ghobadlou’s attorney explicitly said the execution was “illegal and amounted to murder,” arguing that the Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence because of his client’s mental condition. Ghobadlou was executed while his loved ones and the attorney were awaiting his retrial and were unaware that judicial authorities had bypassed legal processes and flouted the basic principles of humanity and the rule of law.
On the same day, the regime also executed Farhad Salimi from Iran’s Kurdish Sunni minority, whose decade-long pleas for a fair retrial, excluding torture-tainted “confessions,” were ignored. Salimi was arrested in December 2009 alongside six other Kurds accused of membership in “Salafist groups.” He was the fourth man in the group executed since November 2023.
Four other Kurds were executed on Jan. 29, 2024 on conviction of having links with Israel’s Mossad and planning to carry out terrorist activities on behalf of the Kurdish dissident organization Komeleh. Although there was footage showing the four men and their wives in Komeleh training camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iranian intelligence ministry acknowledged that they were arrested before they carried out any acts of violence and thus, even by the regime’s laws, were not subject to the death penalty.
January executions also included 18 persons convicted of drug trafficking, which should not incur death penalty under international law. According to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, “unfair trial proceedings… fell far short of due process and fair trial standards required by international human rights law by which Iran is bound.”
It is difficult to obtain reliable information on the exact number of executions in Iran. For example, of executions confirmed by the Iran Human Rights Organization in four provinces in 2022, “only 10 were announced by the Iranian authorities… Approximately 92 percent of executions in four provinces – and 88 percent across Iran – in 2022 were carried out without any report being published in the media inside Iran.”
The number of executions and imprisonments of LGBTQ+ individuals in Iran is also not publicly available but Amnesty International states that members of this community have “suffered systemic discrimination and violence. Consensual same-sex sexual relations remained criminalized with punishments ranging from flogging to the death penalty. State-endorsed ‘conversion therapies’ amounting to torture or other ill-treatment remained prevalent, including against children. Hormone therapy and surgical procedures including sterilization were mandatory for legal gender changes. Gender non-conforming individuals risked criminalization and denial of access to education and employment.”
Iran is one of only six countries, along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, and the United Arab Emirates, that impose the death penalty for same-sex relations. The Center for Human Rights in Iran has reported that the death penalty “can and has been applied to juvenile LGBTQ individuals, flogging and imprisonment are also imposed for many same-sex acts and cross-dressing, activists are convicted of national security crimes for peaceful LGBTQ advocacy and honor killings by LGBTQ family members are encouraged by lenient laws.”
Despite international pressure and condemnation, the Iranian regime has continued to carry out executions in public as a means of instilling additional fear in the population.
Political dissidents and activists are accustomed to facing arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and unfair trials. In addition to Narges Mohammadi, other prominent figures such as human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh have been repeatedly targeted for their work and received harsh sentences.
Religious minorities, especially Bahais and the Christian converts, also face discrimination and persecution. Iranian authorities have used the fact that the Baha’i religion’s headquarters is in the Israeli city of Haifa to denounce the faith and falsely accuse its community of espionage. Amnesty International has reported that Bahais are “subjected to widespread and systematic violations for practicing their faith, including arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture and other ill-treatment, and enforced disappearance. Authorities forcibly closed Baha’i businesses, confiscated dozens of Baha’i properties, demolished their homes and cemeteries, and banned Baha’is from higher education.”
According to the report, an appeals court last year upheld a verdict authorizing the confiscation of 18 Baha’i properties in Semnan province. The previous year, authorities bulldozed six Baha’i houses and confiscated more than 20 hectares of land in the village of Roshankouh in Mazandaran province in northern Iran. There have been reports that whole villages have been razed to target Bahais. On Jan. 4, 2024, authorities seized the buildings, lands, and farms of several Bahai families in Ahmad Abad, another small village in Mazandaran province.
Women’s rights in Iran are another major concern, with many laws and practices that discriminate against women in marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. The mandatory wearing of the hijab and other forms of gender-based discrimination have limited women’s freedoms and opportunities in the country. Amnesty International reports that the Iranian authorities “continued to treat women as second-class citizens, including in relation to marriage, divorce, child custody, employment, inheritance and political office.”
Perhaps because of this discrimination, Iranian women have been at the forefront of movements advocating for greater rights and freedoms for the population at large. The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022-2023, which began as a campaign against enforced veiling and then took on wider anti-regime overtones, was the first major protest in Iran that was led by women and spread across the country. Two women journalists who reported the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody – which touched off the protests — Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi – were arrested and spent 17 months in jail before they were released on bail on Jan. 14, 2024.
Recently, Sara Massoumi, a veteran diplomatic journalist working for the reformist Etemaad newspaper, was sentenced to jail for six months and banned from journalism for two years for a comment on her X social page about the death of a teenage girl, Armita Geravand, blamed on hijab enforcers in a Tehran subway in an echo of Amini’s demise.
Rights violations are not limited to women, religious minorities, journalists, or political activists. Every class and strata of Iranian society has experienced abuses from the regime in one way or another. That makes the upcoming anniversary of a revolution that overturned a repressive monarchy only to institute an even more draconian system a particularly sad moment in Iranian history.
Executions and Harsh Sentences Mount as Iran Nears 45th Anniversary of the Islamic Revolution
By Anonymous
Middle East & North Africa
Editor’s note: While the Stimson Center rarely publishes anonymous work, the author of this commentary is a Tehran-based analyst who has requested anonymity out of legitimate concern for their personal safety. The writer is known to appropriate staff, has a track record of reliable analysis, and is in a position to provide an otherwise unavailable perspective.
On December 10, 2023, when the family of Narges Mohammadi was in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace prize on her behalf, she was in Evin prison in Tehran on a hunger strike to protest the repression of followers of the Bahai faith.
Mohammadi was summoned to the women’s ward office, told that she would be tried for her recent activities in prison, and ultimately sentenced to 30 more months on top of the three years she had already served in a 31-year term.
Mohammadi, a co-founder of Defenders of Human Rights in Iran, is a prominent advocate for women’s and children’s rights and for the abolition of the death penalty in Iran. As the Islamic Republic marks its 45th anniversary on Feb. 11, 2024, she is among a number of Iranians who have received harsh new sentences for their efforts to bring world attention to escalating rights violations in Iran, including a record number of executions.
The regimes ruling Iran before and after the 1979 revolution have been authoritarian and harshly repressive. Thanks to satellite TV, internet, and social media, the Islamic Republic’s abuses are more widely known. Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, following the Hamas attack on Israel, the Iranian regime has intensified its crackdown, taking advantage of world attention focused elsewhere. This includes 127 executions from Oct. 7, 2023, to the end of last year.
The death penalty has been applied for drug trafficking, murder, apostasy, same-sex sexual conduct and adultery. Iran has one of the highest rates of execution in the world. According to Amnesty International, Iran executed at least 246 people in 2020, and “at least 333” in 2021. In 2022, the Deputy High Commissioner of the UN human rights office reported 582 confirmed executions. In the first ten months of 2023, the number reached more than 600, an eight-year record.
The practice continues. On Jan. 23, 2024, Mohammad Ghobadlou, a 23-year-old suffering from bipolar disorder, was executed for his participation in 2022 protests against enforced veiling. He was charged with killing a policeman, but his “confession” was extracted during torture, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a U.S.-based nonprofit. Ghobadlou’s attorney explicitly said the execution was “illegal and amounted to murder,” arguing that the Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence because of his client’s mental condition. Ghobadlou was executed while his loved ones and the attorney were awaiting his retrial and were unaware that judicial authorities had bypassed legal processes and flouted the basic principles of humanity and the rule of law.
On the same day, the regime also executed Farhad Salimi from Iran’s Kurdish Sunni minority, whose decade-long pleas for a fair retrial, excluding torture-tainted “confessions,” were ignored. Salimi was arrested in December 2009 alongside six other Kurds accused of membership in “Salafist groups.” He was the fourth man in the group executed since November 2023.
Four other Kurds were executed on Jan. 29, 2024 on conviction of having links with Israel’s Mossad and planning to carry out terrorist activities on behalf of the Kurdish dissident organization Komeleh. Although there was footage showing the four men and their wives in Komeleh training camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iranian intelligence ministry acknowledged that they were arrested before they carried out any acts of violence and thus, even by the regime’s laws, were not subject to the death penalty.
January executions also included 18 persons convicted of drug trafficking, which should not incur death penalty under international law. According to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, “unfair trial proceedings… fell far short of due process and fair trial standards required by international human rights law by which Iran is bound.”
It is difficult to obtain reliable information on the exact number of executions in Iran. For example, of executions confirmed by the Iran Human Rights Organization in four provinces in 2022, “only 10 were announced by the Iranian authorities… Approximately 92 percent of executions in four provinces – and 88 percent across Iran – in 2022 were carried out without any report being published in the media inside Iran.”
The number of executions and imprisonments of LGBTQ+ individuals in Iran is also not publicly available but Amnesty International states that members of this community have “suffered systemic discrimination and violence. Consensual same-sex sexual relations remained criminalized with punishments ranging from flogging to the death penalty. State-endorsed ‘conversion therapies’ amounting to torture or other ill-treatment remained prevalent, including against children. Hormone therapy and surgical procedures including sterilization were mandatory for legal gender changes. Gender non-conforming individuals risked criminalization and denial of access to education and employment.”
Iran is one of only six countries, along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, and the United Arab Emirates, that impose the death penalty for same-sex relations. The Center for Human Rights in Iran has reported that the death penalty “can and has been applied to juvenile LGBTQ individuals, flogging and imprisonment are also imposed for many same-sex acts and cross-dressing, activists are convicted of national security crimes for peaceful LGBTQ advocacy and honor killings by LGBTQ family members are encouraged by lenient laws.”
Despite international pressure and condemnation, the Iranian regime has continued to carry out executions in public as a means of instilling additional fear in the population.
Political dissidents and activists are accustomed to facing arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and unfair trials. In addition to Narges Mohammadi, other prominent figures such as human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh have been repeatedly targeted for their work and received harsh sentences.
Religious minorities, especially Bahais and the Christian converts, also face discrimination and persecution. Iranian authorities have used the fact that the Baha’i religion’s headquarters is in the Israeli city of Haifa to denounce the faith and falsely accuse its community of espionage. Amnesty International has reported that Bahais are “subjected to widespread and systematic violations for practicing their faith, including arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture and other ill-treatment, and enforced disappearance. Authorities forcibly closed Baha’i businesses, confiscated dozens of Baha’i properties, demolished their homes and cemeteries, and banned Baha’is from higher education.”
According to the report, an appeals court last year upheld a verdict authorizing the confiscation of 18 Baha’i properties in Semnan province. The previous year, authorities bulldozed six Baha’i houses and confiscated more than 20 hectares of land in the village of Roshankouh in Mazandaran province in northern Iran. There have been reports that whole villages have been razed to target Bahais. On Jan. 4, 2024, authorities seized the buildings, lands, and farms of several Bahai families in Ahmad Abad, another small village in Mazandaran province.
Women’s rights in Iran are another major concern, with many laws and practices that discriminate against women in marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. The mandatory wearing of the hijab and other forms of gender-based discrimination have limited women’s freedoms and opportunities in the country. Amnesty International reports that the Iranian authorities “continued to treat women as second-class citizens, including in relation to marriage, divorce, child custody, employment, inheritance and political office.”
Perhaps because of this discrimination, Iranian women have been at the forefront of movements advocating for greater rights and freedoms for the population at large. The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022-2023, which began as a campaign against enforced veiling and then took on wider anti-regime overtones, was the first major protest in Iran that was led by women and spread across the country. Two women journalists who reported the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody – which touched off the protests — Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi – were arrested and spent 17 months in jail before they were released on bail on Jan. 14, 2024.
Recently, Sara Massoumi, a veteran diplomatic journalist working for the reformist Etemaad newspaper, was sentenced to jail for six months and banned from journalism for two years for a comment on her X social page about the death of a teenage girl, Armita Geravand, blamed on hijab enforcers in a Tehran subway in an echo of Amini’s demise.
Rights violations are not limited to women, religious minorities, journalists, or political activists. Every class and strata of Iranian society has experienced abuses from the regime in one way or another. That makes the upcoming anniversary of a revolution that overturned a repressive monarchy only to institute an even more draconian system a particularly sad moment in Iranian history.
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