19 December 2025 :
December 18, 2025
IRAN
On 17 December, Iran reached and exceeded 2,000 hangings since the beginning of 2025.
With the 19 executions carried out on 17 December, Iran has carried out at least 2,001 executions in 2025.
According to the Hands off Cain database, 62 executions involved women, 19 of whom were convicted of drug offences, 39 for murder (usually, of husbands), and 1 for political crimes.
Of the 1,941 men hanged, 887 were convicted of murder, 911 for drug offences, 32 for sexual violence, 42 for political offences and/or spying for Israel, 5 for armed robbery, 10 for other offences, and 54 for unidentified offences. Among the men executed, 7 were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime for which they were convicted. 10 executions were carried out in public: 9 for murder and 1 for rape.
The Iranian government has total control over the domestic media and formally reports only a small fraction of executions. Iranian exile NGOs estimate that Iranian government sources (there are no non-governmental media in Iran) report less than 10% of executions.
Complete information can only be gathered by relying on Iranian exile NGOs. Among these, the most active are Hengaw (hengaw.net), IHR (iranhr.net), Hrana (en-hrana.org) and, with regard to the executions of women, Wncri (wncri.org). Hands off Cain also periodically checks other websites, such as KHRN, Iran HRS, Iran HRM, Farda English, Iran International, IranWire, People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK), and others. All these sites report executions that they learn about from their own sources or from funeral posters put up by families. Adding up all the executions, and after checking for any duplicate reports or cases of homonymy (always possible, because the “real” names of those executed are written in Farsi language and characters, and each NGO has slightly different ways of transliterating them into our alphabet), Hands off Cain is able to say that on the morning of 18 December, there had been 2,003 executions.
Broadly speaking, half of the executions concern people accused of murder, and half concern people accused of drug-related offences. A small percentage relate to crimes explicitly recognised as “political” (which in Islamic law fall under the two definitions of “Corruption on Earth” and “War against God”, which by extension means “Offence against Islam”), and some cases of rape.
For comparison, the HoC database recorded 968 executions in 2024, 878 in 2023, 646 in 2022, 377 in 2021, 284 in 2020, 298 in 2019, and 328 in 2018. Either the NGOs' “discovery” work has greatly improved, or it must be acknowledged that the Iranian regime is resorting to executions at a frenzied pace, unprecedented in its history, with the exception of 1988, when, between July and August, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 political prisoners were executed. Leading independent analysts believe that the Iranian regime is aware of the serious difficulties it is facing and is attempting to prevent any kind of popular uprising by resorting to particularly fierce repression. The serious military setbacks Iran has suffered in its decade-long conflict with Israel, the loss of power in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza, and the equally serious difficulties of its Russian ally, which, exhausted by the war of aggression against Ukraine, no longer has the resources to help Iran's proxies in the Middle East, are, according to many observers, at the root of the wave of executions.
