Abdorrahman Boroumand Center

for Human Rights in Iran

https://www.iranrights.org
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As the world marks the World Day Against the Death Penalty, Iran continues to execute hundreds in silence. Nearly half of the 1,172 executions in 2025 (so far) are for non-violent drug offences.

While President Masoud Pezeshkian makes statements on women’s right to choose the hijab and other Iranian officials at the UN focus on the lives taken by Israel during the war in June and claim reparation for victims, the government continues to be silent on the mass killing it perpetrates secretively behind its prisons’ walls. The Islamic Republic of Iran has executed at least 1,172 people in 2025, the highest in three decades, including 72 in the first nine days of October. A significant number of these executions are related to non-violent drug offenses, such as transporting drugs. The actual number of executions may be higher as Iran withholds data on executions and blatantly violates defendants’ rights to proper defense to avoid public scrutiny. The international community must press Iran for transparency, stop supporting its anti-narcotic efforts, and hold it to account for violating its international human rights obligations.
 
Judicial proceedings of Iranians facing capital punishment charges are mired with flaws. The Judiciary approves lawyers of defendants in national security cases carrying the death penalty. Individuals are interrogated without the presence of counsel and coerced into confessions - often through physical or psychological torture - which are then used against them. Rulings are not handed to defendants, their lawyers, or their families, weakening their ability to prepare a proper defense. Lawyers are most often not provided a copy of the ruling and are given limited time to review the case file and the ruling and take notes. To keep the political cost of these executions low, authorities even resort to tricking families into silence and deter them from hiring independent lawyers with false promises of reduced sentences and prison visits. Executions often take place in secret and only a few are officially announced. These are the actions of a state fully aware that is in the wrong.
 
“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 killings,” said Roya Boroumand, Executive Director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. “These are not acts of justice or crime prevention but the desperate violence of a state that has lost the consent of its people.”
Annual breakdown of executions of minorities, children (under the age of 18), women, and for drug-related offences since 2020 to October 9, 2025
At least 575 of those executed this year are for drug-related offences, flouting international human rights law, which Iran has ratified. Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the death penalty is restricted to the “most serious crimes”, which the Human Rights Committee interpreted as intentional killing, and following a fair trial. Drug-related offences are considered as non-violent crimes, therefore falling far short from the ICCPR’s “most serious crime” threshold for capital punishment. 
 
For example, on September 8, 2025, two men, T.N. and B.O., with no past criminal records were executed in Tabriz without any notice to them or their family members. The men were charged with transporting respectively 156kg and 61kg of heroin. Initially, T.N. was sentenced to death and B.O. was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Revolutionary Court of Charuymaq in East Azerbaijan Province. However, Branch 41 of the Supreme Court decided to sentence both men to death. In another case R.N. was executed in April in Kerman for transporting 3,910kg of methamphetamine from Zahedan to Baneh even though the ruling acknowledged that neither the shipment nor the car belonged to the defendant, and that authorities were unable to arrest the owner of the drugs and the car named in the ruling.
 
In addition, legal proceedings in drug-related cases are often marred by a lack of transparency and a clear disregard for the minimum standards of due process enshrined in international law, which Iran has committed to respect. A joint study of ABC and Monash University, Proven With(out) Certainty: How Judges Sentences Defendants to Death for Drug Offences in Iran, found that drug-related judgements often contain vague language and omit key facts such circumstances surrounding arrests, legal reasoning of the courts, and the manner in which evidence was obtained during investigations. In the absence of reliable evidence, the courts often convict defendants based on self-incriminating confessions obtained after sometimes weeks or months of solitary confinement and torture. Judges frequently disregard sentencing guidelines, wrongfully assume the defendants’ guilt, and make arbitrary decisions with tragic consequences. As they did in the case of Azad Shojaei, Edris Ali, and Rasul Ahmad Rasul, who had been involved in the past in smuggling and distributing alcohol in Kurdistan Province and were executed on trumped-up charges without evidence after months of solitary confinement and torture to coerce confessions.
 
The three men were accused of having been involved in 2018, four years before their arrest, in a shipment that may have contained unspecified material used in the assassination of a nuclear scientist two years later, in 2020. The intelligence report mentioned in the ruling acknowledged that they were not aware of the content of the shipment. They were hanged in secret for espionage for Israel on June 25.
Screenshot of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights’ “Iran” page
 
Iran’s only national human rights body, the High Council for Human Rights, focuses on human rights violations elsewhere, in particular by Western countries. It ignores executions and other human rights violations taking place in Iran as it is run by those perpetrating these violations themselves.
 
This body is headed by the country’s Chief Justice, and its members include the Chief Prosecutor, Head of Supreme Court, Head of Iran’s Prisons Organization, members of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s Ministers of Information, Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Islamic Culture and Guidance, and the Police Chief. In reality, the Council’s mandate is to distract and fend off international criticism on human rights in Iran rather than improve the situation of human rights inside Iran.

 While individuals accused of non-violent drug offences are hanged by the hundreds, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) continues to train Iran’s anti-narcotics police to improve investigative skills—without any clear evidence of progress in crime prevention or reform of the Islamic Republic’s punitive justice system. The UNODC’s $22 million Country Partnership Programme (2023–2026) with Iran includes Sub-Programme 1: Border Management and Illicit Trafficking, under which the agency has collaborated with Amin Police University to hold several specialized training events for senior and junior officers.

At the same time, through Sub-Programme 2: Crime, Corruption, and Criminal Justice, UNODC works with Iran’s judiciary “to improve crime prevention measures and promote an effective, fair, and accountable criminal justice system, in line with UN Conventions and universally recognized standards.” Yet, the surge in summary and arbitrary executions and the absence of meaningful reform in Iran’s justice system and human rights practices raise serious questions about the results of years of UNODC cooperation with Iran.

Moreover, the lack of reliable, up-to-date data and crime statistics, apart from Iran’s drug seizure figures, casts further doubt on the agency’s methodology and its ability to assess outcomes.
A screenshot of Iran’s data submissions on crime and criminal justice (or lack thereof)
Iran’s authorities are regularly boasting about their success in drug seizures in Iran’s media. In September for example, the Islamic Republic News Agency interviewed an official of the Anti-Narcotics Police of the Law Enforcement Command (FARAJA), Brigadier General Iraj Kakavand, on a major four-day operation, the 21st phase of the “Calm in the City” plan, leading to the seizing of 10 tons of various narcotics and thousands of arrests: “The operation, lasting four days (September 26 to 29),” said Kakavand, “was launched nationwide after coordination with judicial authorities and with the use of all internal and external organizational resources.”
 
“Thanks to the continuous efforts of specialized anti-narcotics units across the country and the cooperation of other police branches,” he stressed, “more than 12,000 homeless drug users and 5,670 street-level drug dealers were identified, rounded up, and arrested in public spaces and high-risk urban areas… the operation resulted in the arrest of 253 traffickers, the dismantling of 41 small and large drug-trafficking networks, and the detention of 4,380 individuals involved in related activities such as possession, transport, and distribution.”
 
With this single four-day operation, hundreds, if not thousands, will be facing the death penalty and execution in the next few years. Iranian authorities will proudly report their success and provide updated data on drug seizures to the UNODC, but there will be no transparency on the fate of the thousands of drug users and petty dealers arrested or that of the 5,923 people allegedly involved in trafficking who will be prosecuted in a justice system where due process violations and torture are systemic. Iran will not provide data on death sentences and ensuing executions either, as the lack of transparency and reliable metrics seem to have limited impact the UN agencies’ cooperation with Iran.
Executions for Drug-Related Offences since 2013
As the proportion of drug offenders among those executed continues to escalate at an alarming rate, the need for transparency, accountability, and measurable results from this partnership becomes more urgent. At minimum, the UN, in collaboration with civil society, whose work has helped shed light on Iran’s use of the death penalty, should conduct an in-depth assessment of UNODC’s risks of contributing to these human rights violations.

The Islamic Republic does not engage with human rights defenders, whom it seeks instead to discredit and silence. It does, however, engage actively with the UN and its member states, while the very human rights and accountability mechanisms established decades ago to prevent and stop mass killings are being undermined by funding cuts that significantly limit their capacity. Civil society organizations continue to do what they can to expose and stop Iran’s ongoing executions, including by informing the international community. Yet, expressions of concern and condemnation from UN mechanisms have not been sufficient. The international community must demonstrate greater resolve in the face of Iran’s blatant and secretive abuse of the death penalty, translating its outrage into effective, deterrent measures. It should also ensure transparency and hold the UNODC—an agency it funds—accountable for decades of cooperation that may be facilitating Iran’s current wave of mass executions through its training of anti-narcotics police.