Who Holds the Rope

On capital punishment in Iran, the argument the opposition will not make, and the one the Muslim tradition already supplies

An iron scaffold went up in Alikhani Square in Isfahan on Monday night. People gathered. There were scuffles with the guards. In the early hours of Tuesday, Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi were hanged in public, and by breakfast the clip was everywhere.[1]

I want to start somewhere less comfortable than the timelines.

Capital punishment did exist before the revolution. Capital punishment was not invented by the Islamic Republic. Iran’s first penal code dates to 1926, a secondary code with no religious influence, sanctioned by one of the most respected Ayatollahs of the day, and it carried the death penalty.[2] Under the Pahlavis the executions were mostly private: firing squads for politicals, the rope for common crime. Ervand Abrahamian counted fewer than 100 political prisoners executed between 1971 and 1979. Between 1981 and 1985 the figure was above 7,900.[3]

So the gallows did not arrive in 1979. What arrived was the scale, and a new grammar for it.

What the Count Can and Cannot Settle

For 2025 the monitors give: 1,639 (Iran Human Rights and ECPM), 1,858 (Hengaw), 1,922 (HRANA), 2,167 (Iran HRM), 2,228 (Iran Human Rights Society). A spread of nearly 600 between the lowest and the highest. Every one of them calls it the worst year since 1989.[4]

In ‘Three Thousand Five Hundred’ I went hard at a broadcaster who put 30,000 into the air against a researcher’s own count of 3,500. I would do it again.[5] But I owe a distinction I did not draw there. That was a number manufactured for effect. This is a spread between careful people counting under a blackout, where under 7 per cent of last year’s executions were ever announced officially.[6] The curve is not in dispute. Only its exact height is.

Here is the part nobody will put on a placard. Of the 1,639, at least 795 were drug convictions – roughly half, a category invented by a law of June 1980, and one that has never produced a rally anywhere.[7] At Qezel Hesar, some 1,500 prisoners condemned for ordinary crimes have been on dry hunger strike since 13 July.[8] Their names are not being read out at any vigil in Toronto or Stockholm.

A Bad Law

My point of departure is that I disagree with capital punishment as a bad law. It is a legal instrument which is irreversible. If there is any mistake on the side of the judge or the judiciary in passing that verdict on a convicted person, the consequences are irreversible, and that brings ethical and legal responsibility for the person who is doing it. In particular for a Muslim.

I say in particular because in Islam, taking one person’s life is equated with taking the life of the entire humanity, and there is therefore a great deal of moral weight behind resisting it. The tradition even builds the exit into the sentence: under qiṣāṣ, retaliation, the sentence sits with the family of the victim, who may forgive. If we are looking for a strong argument against capital punishment, it comes much better from inside the Muslim tradition and the ethical framework that tradition gives us than from any borrowed vocabulary.

Disagreeing with the law is not disagreeing with the conviction. If the crime is established, if the person convicted has gone through legal due process, and if we can reasonably show that, my argument still stands. Capital punishment must not happen. The worst case is a life sentence, and that is a thing we need to be able to coordinate, to temper, to qualify under the present circumstances and in the best interest of society.

This is not a political issue. It is a legal one, and it is true across the board, about all countries. Punishment is a deterrent. Punishment is not an objective in itself. I am addressing the legal experts inside Iran here, among whom I know there is a great deal of disagreement and a great deal of contestation over the whole thing.

Whose Rope

Now the bottom line. The way the opposition of the Islamic Republic is making a huge propaganda against the recent executions just does not add up to history. It does not look at the nuances of it. It does not offer a rigorous, legal, strong, rational argument against capital punishment itself.

The problem these people have is who is doing the capital punishment. It is the Islamic Republic which is the problem. The problem is not the capital punishment, and we need to make it very clear, we need to be very distinct about it.

There is a test, and it takes one sentence. Ask any of them to say, on the record: no Iranian state, under any flag, should hang anyone. Ask whether a restored monarchy would abolish the death penalty on its first day, or keep it for the people it would then be holding. Ask about the 795. The silence will tell you what the placards will not.

They do not care about the existence or the non-existence of capital punishment. All they care about is the existence of the Islamic Republic as a regime, as a state that they do not like.

I hold both of these together, and they do not cancel. The scaffold at Alikhani Square should never have gone up, and the two young men should be alive this evening. That is a claim about scaffolds. Almost everything that will be said about them today is a claim about flags.

Declaration on AI use: the argument, the claims and the judgements in this essay are my own, dictated in a recorded planning note and reproduced here largely in my own wording. An AI assistant was used to verify figures against published human rights reporting, to supply the citations, and to enforce house style. No claim, source or conclusion originates with the model.

[1] ‘Iran executes two protesters amid heavy security in Isfahan’, Iran International, 28 July 2026, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202607289410; ‘The Public Executions of Abolfazl Sepahi and Amir Hossein Safari’, Iran Human Rights Monitor, 28 July 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/07/28/the-public-executions-of-abolfazl-sepahi-and-amir-hossein-safari-a-direct-consequence-of-international-inaction/.

[2] Roya Boroumand, interviewed by Anne Holsinger, ‘Capital Punishment in Iran’, Discussions with DPIC, Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, https://www.iranrights.org/library/document/4066.

[3] Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 135–36, as quoted in Juan Cole, ‘How the Ayatollahs’ Iran became the Execution Capital of the World’, Informed Comment, 27 May 2023, https://www.juancole.com/2023/05/ayatollahs-execution-capital.html. Verified at the quotation, not against the volume; please confirm the page range before publication.

[4] Iran Human Rights and ECPM, 18th Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran (April 2026), https://iranhr.net/en/reports/44/; Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights, annual report, 30 December 2025; HRANA annual report, 26 December 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202512268741; Iran Human Rights Monitor, ‘Annual Report on Human Rights Violations in Iran in 2025 – Part 2’, 5 January 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/01/05/annual-report-on-human-rights-violations-in-iran-in-2025-part-2/; Iran Human Rights Society, 9 January 2026, https://en.iranhrs.org/statistical-review-and-analysis-of-executions-in-2025-breaking-the-record-of-human-rights-violations-in-iran-with-2228-executions/.

[5] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Three Thousand Five Hundred’, The Twin Wisdoms, 25 July 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/three-thousand-five-hundred/.

[6] 18th Annual Report, as above: 113 executions (under 7 per cent) announced by official sources, against 9.7 per cent in 2024 and 15 per cent in 2023.

[7] 18th Annual Report, as above. On the origin of the category, see ‘Legislative Framework of Death Penalty in Iran’, Iran Human Rights: the Legal Bill to Intensify Punishments for Perpetrators of Drug Crimes was passed on 9 June 1980, introducing the death penalty for drug offences for the first time, https://www.iranhr.net/en/articles/7406/.

[8] ‘Iran Mobilizes Repression, the International Community Mobilizes Inaction’, Iran Human Rights Monitor, 22 July 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/07/22/iran-mobilizes-repression-the-international-community-mobilizes-inaction/.