A hanging in Iran is never just about punishing the condemned. It is meant for the prisoner’s family, an entire generation and everyone who may consider returning to the streets. The death penalty serves two political purposes at once: It punishes yesterday’s dissent and aims to prevent tomorrow’s uprising.
That logic is not new. It has shaped the Islamic Republic from its earliest years. In his final findings as the United Nations’ “special rapporteur” (investigator) on Iran, Javaid Rehman called for accountability for the mass killings of political opponents in 1981-1982 and the 1988 prison massacre. He concluded that the 1988 atrocities amounted to “crimes against humanity or murder and extermination” and “genocide.” During that summer, thousands of political prisoners were executed after summary proceedings conducted under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa. Their families were often denied the bodies, burial locations and even truthful death certificates.
The principal targets of the 1988 death commissions were members and supporters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), although prisoners from other opposition groups were also killed. The Iranian opposition has identified 5,049 MEK members and sympathizers among the victims. The scale and systematic character of the massacre explain why its legacy still shapes the regime’s use of execution as an instrument of political survival.
The relevance of 1988 is not merely historical. The same political calculation survives today: When the state fears organized dissent, it turns the scaffold into a public message. The difference today is that this message is being delivered to a society that has repeatedly defied it.
Last January’s uprising exposed the government’s deepest vulnerability. Economic anger rapidly became a challenge to the political system itself. The demonstrations were crushed with mass unlawful killings and arrests, but repression did not resolve the grievances that drove people into the streets. It left the authorities facing a familiar problem: They can disperse a protest, but they cannot eliminate the conditions that produced it, nor the growing unrest of a massively abused population.
The ensuing execution campaign should be understood in that context. On July 28, Amnesty International reported that Iran had arbitrarily executed at least 26 people for alleged offenses connected to the January protests, following grossly unfair, torture-tainted trials before Revolutionary Courts. At least 26 others had been executed on politically motivated charges. Amnesty warned that a minimum of 60 additional people, including individuals arrested as children, faced execution after death sentences were imposed connected to the protests.
Many of these cases rely on elastic national-security accusations such as “enmity against God” or “corruption on earth.” Defendants may be denied lawyers during interrogation, convicted through coerced confessions and tried behind closed doors. Public hangings add another layer to the message: The authorities transform punishment into spectacle, making fear visible in the places where citizens recently gathered to protest.
The numbers reveal more than a human rights emergency. They describe a governing strategy. Tehran is trying to identify, isolate and eliminate people who might become symbols, organizers or experienced participants in another uprising. A death sentence imposed months after a demonstration is therefore not simply retaliation. It is an attempt to shape future behavior through fear.
Yet the brutal strategy may be producing the opposite effect. Opposition to capital punishment is spreading beyond prisoners’ families and traditional human rights circles. The “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign, built around coordinated hunger strikes by political and other prisoners, has expanded across dozens of prisons.
Retirees protesting deteriorating living conditions have also raised slogans against executions. When pensioners demanding the income they earned begin denouncing the gallows, a socioeconomic protest becomes a judgment on the nature of the state.
This convergence matters. Iranian protests have often emerged from separate constituencies: workers demanding unpaid wages, teachers seeking fair salaries, pensioners confronting poverty, students defending basic freedoms and families seeking justice for those killed or imprisoned. “No to executions” can provide a shared moral and political language among movements that the government has worked hard to keep apart.
Washington should stop treating these executions as a humanitarian footnote to nuclear talks or regional security. Domestic repression and foreign aggression are instruments of survival for the same ruling structure. A regime that pays no meaningful price for killing protesters has little reason to honor commitments made across a negotiating table.
The United States should place a verifiable halt to political executions at the center of any engagement with Tehran. It should coordinate diplomatic pressure, impose targeted sanctions on judges, prosecutors and prison officials involved in death sentences, and support an independent international mechanism to preserve evidence and pursue accountability. Washington should also demand access to detainees, publication of their names and charges, and protection for families and lawyers who expose abuses.
This is a lower-cost course than another war and a more credible one than open-ended negotiations that leave Tehran’s machinery of repression untouched. It does not require American soldiers to fight Iran’s battle or sweeping measures that punish ordinary Iranians. It targets the officials who operate the gallows and makes clear that diplomatic contact does not confer impunity. Currently, silence tells the regime that executions carry little external cost.
Iran’s leaders believe that everybody suspended from a rope helps demoralize and disperse society. They may discover the reverse. The scaffold that was designed to isolate opponents is becoming a point of collective recognition. Every execution remains a political act, but it is also helping bring into being a political answer: a growing refusal to allow fear to determine Iran’s future.
