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IRAN - Foreword to the 2025 Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran
April 13, 2026: April 13, 2026 - IRAN. Foreword to the 2025 Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran
By Nasrin Sotoudeh
Every year, leading personalities, lawyers and human rights defenders write the foreword to the Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran. For the 2025 report, we are honoured to have prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh pen the foreword.
On 1 April 2026, Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested at her home in Tehran while on medical furlough. At the time of publication (7 April), she remains held incommunicado, with no information disclosed regarding her fate or whereabouts.
Global execution statistics are published annually. Iran has ranked first in executions per capita for many years and continues to be amongst the countries with the highest number of executions overall.
The reasons for opposing the inhuman punishment of execution are so clear that they hardly require repetition. Nevertheless, governments such as the Islamic Republic of Iran often invoke public opinion to justify this inhuman punishment. For example, they claim that murderers or drug traffickers are executed because society demands it, as though that settles the matter.
But why does the story continue? Because this heinous and inhuman punishment cannot be justified by public pressure.
I wish to refer to the worst form of execution, namely public pressure calling for the execution of a particular individual or group. Such circumstances usually arise after revolutions and the experience of harsh dictatorship. We experienced this ourselves within the past half-century. After the 1979 Revolution, many officers and senior officials of the monarchy were executed without fair trials. Yet the cycle of violence did not end, and the execution machine went on to claim the lives of others, including those who had contributed to the revolution’s victory. This cycle has not ceased to this day, nearly half a century later, and has in fact accelerated.
From the very beginning, these executions were strongly criticised by jurists such as Abdolkarim Lahiji. However, they were supported by most political groups and by public opinion. When it came time for the revolutionaries themselves to face execution, society had fallen into a profound and fearful silence, as so often happens in revolutions…
This is precisely why death sentences should never be issued under the influence of public opinion. Socrates, too, was sentenced to death at the age of seventy by a vote of the Athenian majority and chose to drink the cup of poison rather than leave Athens.
Iran is now openly facing a transfer of power, and there is concern that whichever group replaces the Islamic Republic may once again resort to widespread executions in order to consolidate its authority, thereby perpetuating this inhuman punishment. In the words of Georg Büchner, no revolution can afford to ignore this scythe of death. Therefore, in my view, the first question that must be put to any group seeking to replace the current system is: “Will you explicitly and unequivocally abolish the death penalty?” This is the guarantee that must be demanded in order to prevent further violence. Our concern, as ordinary citizens, is the protection of human life and the elimination of violence.
We renounce violence and executions in order to protect ourselves and our collective future.
Nasrin Sotoudeh
Tehran, 20 February 2026
https://iranhr.net/en/articles/8674/ (Source: IHR)
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