Iran: spreading fear

Mahmood Reza Amiry-Moghaddam. When the protests started, thousands of people were arrested and placed in prisons that were already overcrowded. In some facilities, prisoners slept in corridors, or anywhere where they could find space. Iran Human Rights also documented protesters being held incommunicado in non-official buildings.

Authorities wanted to massively issue death sentences against arrested protestors. But they were unable to do so because of international reactions and the high political cost of such sentences. Less than 20 death sentences were issued against protestors in 2023. Nine of them were executed, six are still on death row.

In addition, in many facilities, there is no distinction between prisoners. Prisoners sentenced for violent crimes are detained together with political prisoners, or prisoners who have mental health issues. When hundreds of prisoners with different charges are detained in the same area, it creates additional tensions. It affects all the aspects of life in detention. Authorities use this to put pressure on political prisoners, who sometimes get beaten almost to death by other prisoners. They come to think it is a decision of authorities to punish them even more.

Implementation of death sentences is linked to the political changes, as the Iranian regime uses death penalty as a political tool to instil fear. There are currently thousands of death row prisoners in Iran. It is difficult to know precisely how many they are due to a lack of transparency.

Executions are more frequent since the beginning of the protests. Many prisoners who were executed in 2023 had been sitting on death row for several years. Death sentences were sometimes implemented as a punishment for protests organised by prisoners inside facilities. In some prisons, authorities carried out executions weekly, without announcing which prisoners would be executed. It creates a climate of anxiety. Prisoners are left to wonder whose turn it is next week.

Julia Bourbon Fernandez. Out of the 834 executions carried out in 2023, seven were in public, meaning that most executions took place inside prison facilities. Prisoners might have attended executions. It is part of the political way to create fear inside and outside prisons. Also, Iran is the world’s top executioner of women. At least 22 women were executed in 2023, which is the highest number of women executed since 2014. This reflects the high number of executions overall.

Most of the executions were not against the protesters, or not directly linked with the demonstrations that started after the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. Thanks to the mobilisation from civil society, NGOs and ultimately the international community – including the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations on Human Rights in Iran and the fact-finding mission established by the United Nations Human Rights Council – the number of protesters sentenced to death or executed was limited, in comparison with the total number of people executed.

MRAM. According to the Islamic Penal Code, Qisas means “retribution in kind”, basically “an eye for an eye”. These laws are implemented for both intentional and unintentional killings, due to a lack of grading and disregard for intent. The victim’s family – the plaintiff – can decide between blood money (diya), retribution, or forgiveness.

The indicative amount of blood money is determined by the Head of the Judiciary every year in March, for the Iranian New Year. In 2024, it was set at 1.2 billion tomans (approximately 17,000€) for a Muslim man, and 600 million tomans (approximately 8,500€) for a Muslim woman. There is no upper limit. The person convicted for murder who cannot afford the amount will be executed, as many are every year. Qisas laws are a discriminatory and cruel mechanism: poor people get hanged more often.

Qisas for murder means sentencing to death the person who has committed the crime. One of the inhumane sides of Qisas is that it puts the responsibility of an execution on the shoulders of the victim’s family. Qisas laws allow the regime to make families of murder victims complicit in executions.

Those who have lost a loved one are in turn converted into executioners. The plaintiff asking for retribution, or their representative, must be present when the sentence is implemented, usually by hanging. In addition, very often, the plaintiff is encouraged to carry out the actual hanging by pulling away the stool on which the prisoner sentenced to death is standing. That is traumatic by itself.

JBF. The authorities really put the responsibility of implementing death penalty on the shoulders of the population. They use this system to argue that executions are a result of the will of people.

MRAM. On the other hand, Qisas laws also provides ordinary people an opportunity to say no to death penalty. In the report, there is a section about the forgiveness movement. In recent years, an increasing number of plaintiffs choose either forgiveness or blood money instead of retribution. In a survey in 2020, we asked about 20,000 people above 18 years of age living in Iran what they would choose if a close family member was murdered: retribution, forgiveness or blood money? More than 70% of them did not choose retribution. The general population is not aligned with the regime, the majority does not want death penalty.

MRAM. In general, the marginalised are disproportionally executed in Iran. When you look at maps included in the report, the province with the highest number of executions per capita is South Khorasan, which is the absolute poorest province. Numbers are also relatively high in Baluchistan and in Kurdish regions. People living in these regions are poor, marginalised. There is more opposition to the regime there. Therefore, the regime’s need to create fear is higher is such provinces.

JBF. People who were executed for murder or drug-related charges, most of the time, belong to the most marginalised categories of population, such as the poor or ethnic minorities. This is a way for the regime to show that anybody in the population can be executed. The authorities may also transfer prisoners from one province to another after arrest to increase the number of executions in a given province and instil more fear.

MRAM. Prisoners facing security-related charges, such as affiliation to a Kurdish group, are also under more pressure than the others. They are transferred to central areas, either to keep them further away from their own people to avoid protests, or to centralise them, and maybe to use certain interrogation techniques. Prisoners charged for security reasons are very often transferred to Tehran or to prisons close to this city. In Tehran, they are interrogated by one of the many parallel bodies of the Iranian security system.

When people are on death row in Tehran, especially for political reasons, there are campaigns to save them and information about their case. In central Iran or big cities like Tehran, authorities try to maintain the appearance of respecting safeguards regarding trials and detention. But in Baluchistan or in Kurdish regions, death sentences do not get the same attention. Human rights activists in such regions are under more pressure, because they are accused of separatism or terrorism by the regime’s propaganda machine. Creating awareness around issues like the death penalty is much more difficult. Where there is less oversight, authorities operate with minimal accountability. The lawlessness observed in the Iranian judicial system is even stronger in the ethnic regions.

Public hangings are a tool still used by the regime to instil fear, despite the high political cost of such executions. However, in the recent years and especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, the numbers declined. At some point, over the last 14 or 15 years, there were more than 60 public executions every year. But it seems that the number of public executions might be on the rise again.

JBF. They stopped public executions during Covid, because of the restrictions on gatherings. But they resumed this practice in 2022 and increased it slowly but steadily. It is linked to the overall increase of executions. It is difficult to measure the psychological impact of a public hanging for the people who attend, particularly children. Torture is also part of the tools used by the regime to create fear among the population.

MRAM. Hearing about an execution sends a clear message to the public, but seeing it is even more terrifying. Authorities would rather have a larger number of public executions, but the political cost would be too high. They do calculations of what would be the cost and benefits for them. They know that, especially with the situation in the past couple of years, public executions can lead to anger among the international community and the Iranian population. International pressure is one of the elements that eventually made the authorities back down in the past, for instance on the use of death penalty for drug offences. The space available to manoeuvre on the use of death penalty is very little, but it is there.