UN Experts Urge Iran to End Executions Amid Concerns Over Torture and Unfair Trials

The experts describe Iran as the world’s most prolific executioner relative to its population, placing it among a shrinking number of countries that continue to carry out death sentences.

UN human rights experts have called for an immediate stop to executions in Iran, raising concerns about people sentenced to death through proceedings marked by torture, forced confessions and restricted access to lawyers. Their statement, titled "Iran: UN experts urge immediate halt to executions as country drives global surge," was issued on 9 October 2026. It is a UN human rights press release, rather than a research study published in an academic journal.

The experts describe Iran as the world's most prolific executioner relative to its population, placing it among a shrinking number of countries that continue to carry out death sentences. Their appeal connects the immediate danger facing prisoners with wider concerns about political repression, poverty, discrimination and the treatment of women.

Protest Arrests Raise Serious Questions About Fair Trials

The statement describes the killing of thousands of protesters by security forces in January 2026, conduct that the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission found amounted to crimes against humanity. For people arrested in connection with those protests, the threat of execution adds another layer of fear to a crackdown that has already taken many lives.

The experts say nobody detained over the protests should be executed, regardless of the charges brought against them. Cases brought to their attention involved allegations of torture, enforced disappearances, sexual violence and coerced confessions, alongside denial of access to lawyers of the defendants' choosing, particularly during investigations.

These failures undermine the fairness of the proceedings and, in the experts' assessment, are sufficient grounds to rule out execution.

Their criticism also concerns broadly defined national security offences that allow peaceful activity to be treated as a threat to the State. They warn that using executions to silence dissent leaves people's grievances unresolved, creating conditions for further unrest rather than addressing the reasons people protest.

Poverty and Discrimination Shape Who Faces Execution

Security prosecutions attract considerable attention, but the experts say most executions in Iran concern homicide, punished through qisas, or retribution-in-kind, and drug-related offences.

The statement argues that executions offer an easy substitute for the more demanding work of addressing the conditions behind homicide and the drug trade, including poverty, discrimination and gender-based violence. Punishing individuals with death does little to confront those underlying problems.

People executed for drug offences appear to be overwhelmingly low-level couriers pushed into the trade by economic hardship, many of them from marginalised ethnic minorities. The experts draw attention to the gap between those who face execution and the people directing or profiting from the trade at its highest levels.

Their concern is that the harshest punishment falls on people whose circumstances leave them particularly vulnerable, without resolving the conditions that draw others into similar situations.

Women Face Added Risks Under Retribution Laws

Under qisas, the experts explain, responsibility for decisions over life and death shifts from judges to victims' families. A person's ability to pay diya, commonly called blood money, can determine whether they survive.

This makes financial inequality a matter of life and death, with especially serious consequences for women convicted of killing abusive husbands. The statement describes women who experienced child marriage and years of violence, then faced execution because they could not afford the payment needed to avoid it.

The experts place these cases within a wider failure to protect women from domestic violence or provide practical ways to escape abuse. Their account shows how violence at home, financial dependence and the absence of legal protection can shape the circumstances leading to a death sentence.

A Call to Stop Executions and Review Every Death Sentence

The experts also highlight laws that make consensual same-sex acts and religious offences, including apostasy, punishable by death. The harm extends beyond the number of executions carried out: the existence of these laws forces people to live with fear over their beliefs, their decision to change or leave a religion, or their sexual orientation.

Their recommendations are direct: establish an immediate moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolition, commute all death sentences and review every case against fair trial standards.

For prisoners facing execution, those measures would provide an immediate chance of survival and a review of how their cases were handled. For the wider population, the experts argue, ending executions would signal that authorities can move away from a system responsible for far too many arbitrary deaths.