The Islamic Republic of Iran executed more than 2,150 individuals last year, spearheading a shocking global surge that has pushed recorded judicial killings worldwide to their highest levels since 1981, AFP reported.
According to a comprehensive annual report released Sunday night by Amnesty International, the spike is directly tied to authoritarian regimes ruthlessly clamping down on internal opposition.
The organization confirmed that at least 2,707 executions took place globally in 2025. Of that international total, an astounding 2,159 hangings were carried out by Tehran alone, a number that more than doubles the Iranian regime's execution metrics from 2024.
However, the UK-based monitor emphasized that its global calculations explicitly omit the thousands of state-sanctioned killings believed to have occurred in China.
Excluding China's hidden data, the documented global total of 2,707 executions - which spanned nations such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Yemen, Singapore, and the United States - marks an escalation of over two-thirds compared to the previous year. Amnesty International identified a clear correlation between capital punishment and political survival.
In Iran, the sudden and staggering increase in recorded executions came as the fundamentalist authorities intensified their use of the death penalty as a tool of political repression and control, particularly in the wake of the June 2025 war against Israel.
The bloodletting has shown no signs of slowing down in 2026. Watchdogs report that Tehran is further accelerating executions following widespread domestic protests in January and the regime's military confrontations against Israel and the United States.
The confirmed 2,159 executions inside Iran for 2025 drastically outpaced earlier conservative estimates published by the Norway-based Iran Human Rights NGO, officially marking the highest casualty rate documented in the country, and the world, since 1981.
Last December, Washington-based rights group HRANA released a report showing that at least 1,922 people were executed in Iran in 2025, more than double the number recorded the previous year.
There has long been a concern over the number of executions in Iran, which activists say disproportionately target members of the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, notably Kurds in the northwest, Arabs in the southwest and Baluch in the southeast.