Dozens of men and women are unlawfully killed in Iran each year—secretly, continuously, and without equitable trials—for claimed drug crimes in judicial proceedings that disregard every law and norm concerning capital punishment. The killings constitute a mass atrocity, according to the Washington Center For Human Rights (WCHR).
Investigations by WCHR, involving comprehensive interviews with lawyers handling these cases in Iran and former prisoners who were sentenced on drug charges, have found these executions to occur following grotesque miscarriages of justice, such as:
- The right to counsel and all other essential elements of due process are withheld;
- Instances of confused and generally poor-level drug offenders are expedited through the courts;
- Laws—both domestic and international—are outrageously disregarded and broken;
- The overwhelming majority of drug executions are never reported; the enormous and swelling figures probably represent only a fraction of the executions.
A considerable number of the people executed are from marginalized and poor areas controlled by Iran’s minority groups, and this is indicative of the perpetual connection in Iran between illegal state brutality and the persecution of the state’s minority groups.
Within the first three months of 2025 alone, at least 106 people were put to death for narcotics crimes—46% of the total executions in the country so far this year, which have risen across-the-board in Iran. The figure is probably higher since only 11 of the total 230 executions this year have been publicly reported by official sources, rendering documentation much more difficult.
The increasing statistics don’t look like letting up: During the first 15 days of April alone, at least 24 people were killed on charges of drug-related crimes, as per WCHR’s findings—equivalent to almost two people every day.
Capital punishment has become the Islamic Republic’s most blunt instrument of repression, being disproportionately targeted against the most vulnerable to defend themselves: ethnic minorities, immigrants, and people from underprivileged and impoverished regions.
Drug-connections executions in Iran are being utilized to terrorize the most vulnerable members of society. Such punishments demonstrate how the Iranian regime endeavors to veil political restrictions in the guise of law enforcement language. The international community needs to voice its condemnation of these state killings at a mass scale.
WCHR calls for the European Union, United Nations, and governments across the world to:
- Strongly condemn Iran’s death penalty practices, particularly for narcotics offenses.
- Make all contact with the Iranian government include human rights standards, particularly those about executions.
- Advocate for a moratorium on all death sentences in Iran.
- Demand the halting of all UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) collaboration with Tehran until executions for drug-related crimes prevent.
- Take action against those judicial officers involved in illicit drug-related killings.
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