Mideast: Incarcerated Iranians Protest Execution
Yesterday was the 58th consecutive weekly hunger strike in Iranian prisons. Every Tuesday, for over a year, protestors in prisons across Iran have held hunger strikes. They are protesting the Islamic Revolutionary Government of Iran’s rampant use of executions. In 2024, Iran executed over 900 people. The protests began in the Ghezel Hesar Prison in the Karaj region of Iran. Since then, word spread on social media and between prisoners and the weekly hunger strikes have taken hold in prisons across the country.
The Islamic Republic of Iran began in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution. The new government is a Shia-led theocracy which enforces strict morality laws on its people and uses a powerful law enforcement apparatus to quash dissent. As is the result of many revolutions, the people who took over and created the new regime became terrified of another revolution, which could topple them as the previous rulers were toppled. Their fear resulted in authoritarianism.
Soon after the 1979 takeover, the new Islamic Republic began issuing laws that enforced strict adherence to certain interpretations of Islamic law. For example, women were expected to cover themselves completely in public. The Guidance Patrol enforces these rules, which include policing the dress code and enforcing chaste behavior.
Obviously, this is not popular. The regime immediately met resistance. The government is also sectarian and strictly ruled by Shia clerics, meanwhile Iran is a massive country and is diverse religiously, ethnically, and politically. Minority groups complained of abuse and neglect immediately. Iran’s support for terror organizations resulted in sanctions from the West which decimated their economy and created opposition from the working classes. The state response to opposition? Prison.
After the revolution succeeded, by 1981, the optimism about change had faded. The new regime was in full despotism mode. The vague and arbitrary authority of religion means they can easily imprison people for basically anything. A carte blanche for repression. In the 1980s, at least 20,000 Iranian prisoners were executed.
Protests sprung up, particularly after an extra heinous act by the authorities. These protests are met with extreme violence from the government. Recently, in 2022, feminist protests swept the nation and global newspapers covered the rebellion. In response, hundreds of protestors were killed on sight, jailed indefinitely, or disappeared.
Every year since 2021, Iran has executed more prisoners than the year before. Crimes that warrant capital punishment in Iran range in severity from the worst crimes a person can commit- rape, murder, terrorism‒ to crimes considered utterly benign in much of the world; adultery, homosexuality, pornography, and alcohol consumption.
In January 2024, four Kurdish political activists were executed by the regime. Anwar Khezri, Farhad Salimi, Kamran Sheikheh, and Khosrow Basharat were prisoners in Ghezel Hesar Prison and accused of spying for Israel with dubious, unsubstantiated, and circumstantial evidence. Fellow inmates in Ghezel Hesar Prison, which is located about fifteen miles from Tehran in Karaj, Iran, held a hunger strike. Word spread of their protest on social media, encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, and the online media. The next week, prisoners from the women’s ward at Evin prison joined the weekly hunger strike. Evin prison in Tehran is known for housing political prisoners and is colloquially called “Evin University” as so many intellectuals and students are incarcerated there.
After 30 weeks, prisoners were striking in 17 prisons. After another 28 weeks, the weekly hunger strike is held at 37 prisons across the country.
For many in Iranian detention or facing the death penalty, there is little legal recourse to appeal, dissent, or respond. Furthermore, the Iranian judicial system is regularly decried globally for failing international standards for fairness. Judges routinely deem the accused guilty or not based on their “divine knowledge,” lawyers for political protestors are chosen from a government-approved list, and confessions are achieved with torture or threats.
The most common justification for the death penalty is to punish drug-related offenses. Activists and human rights groups point out that minority groups in Iran make up an outsized portion of those executed. Baloch people, Kurds, and Turks are the biggest Sunni minority groups in Iran. Activist Ahmadreza Haeri, a founder of the movement from Ghezel Hesar, hopes the movement can move the goalposts in Iran. Without ending some of the most brutal tools of repression, there is little hope of true progress.
I believe deeply that ‘No Death Penalty’ is a strategic campaign for both today and our future. If we all agree on just this one principle of the UDHR, and make the right to life an unbreakable red line, we can hope for a a brighter future.
— Ahmadreza Haeri
68 different organizations around the world signed an open letter by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty in support of the No Death Penalty Tuesdays movement. Last week on the 25th of February, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called out Iran, Saudi Arabia, the US, and others for contributing to the rise in state executions and remarked forcefully that the death penalty is “incompatible with human dignity and the right to life.”
An NGO called Iran Human Rights verified 87 state executions in Iran in January of 2025. Of the 87 they verified, only five per cent were reported through official channels. On Amnesty International’s website, they have urgent actions regarding ten Iranian political prisoners with execution sentences just in the last month.
Tragically, the rate of execution has been increasing. Iran is becoming more and more of a pariah state, especially as it loses international leverage following its Axis of Resistance failure in the dwindling war against Israel. Iranians have not been quiet in the 46 years of oppression. Protests continue in many forms despite the violence. In a nation with very few civil rights, those with the fewest rights and the most at risk are raising their voices in unison.
