Executions in Iran rose even further during 2013. After the election on 14 June of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new President, some steps to improve the country’s image were undertaken, such as the release of possibly dozens of political prisoners, including one under sentence of death. However, there were no indications that his election led to changes in Iran’s application of the death penalty.
Iranian authorities or state-controlled or -sanctioned media officially acknowledged 369 executions (358 men and 11 women), a rise of 18% from 2012. However, there is credible evidence that large numbers of executions were carried out in secret, and reliable sources reported at least 335 additional executions (including at least 18 women). This would bring the total for 2013 to at least 704. Reports indicate that at least 11 of the executed may have been aged under 18 at the time of their alleged crimes. At least 44 executions were carried out in public, usually using cranes which lifted the condemned person by a noose around the neck in front of a crowd of spectators. At least 91 new death sentences were reported as imposed, but the true number is almost certainly much higher.
Executions in 2013 were mostly carried out following convictions for murder, drug trafficking, rape, espionage and vaguely worded offences of moharebeh (“enmity against God”) and ifsad fil arz (“corruption on earth”). The crime of moharebeh is principally aimed at armed insurrection, but in practice has been applied to cases where the accused have not taken up arms, but allegedly were associated with organizations that have been proscribed in Iran. The scope of the death penalty in Iran remained broad and included as capital “crimes”, among others, “adultery while married”, “apostasy” and “sodomy” – acts which do not meet the international standard of “most serious crimes”, but which should also not be considered crimes at all. In May then-President Ahmadinejad signed into law revisions to the Islamic Penal Code, which among other things maintained stoning as punishment for the “crime” of “adultery”.
The majority of those executed were convicted of drug offences which are tried in Revolutionary Courts. These proceedings routinely fall far short of international fair trial standards; they are frequently held behind closed doors, sometimes only last hours or even minutes, and judges have the discretion to restrict lawyers’ access to the defendant. There is also no right to a meaningful appeal under Iran’s Anti-Narcotics Law. In April and November respectively, Denmark and Ireland ended financial support for an anti-drug programme in Iran – administered by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime – due to concerns over the increased use of the death penalty for drug offences in recent years.
Death sentences are typically imposed following proceedings that violate fair trial standards.
During the pre-trial phase, this includes incommunicado detention, detention far exceeding time limits provided for in Iranian law, and the extraction of “confessions” through torture and other ill-treatment, which in addition are sometimes televised before a trial takes place.
Although courts acknowledged that defendants retracted such “confessions” they still accepted them as evidence. Claims of torture are generally not investigated. Defendants are often denied the opportunity to have legal representation of their own choice.
With regard to executions, lawyers report not being informed beforehand despite legal requirements under Iranian law that they must receive 48 hours’ notification of a client’s execution. The families of executed prisoners are not always given an opportunity for a final visit, or told the date of the executions, either in advance or after they have taken place.
Often the only indication of an imminent execution is the transfer of a prisoner to solitary confinement, known as the “execution waiting room.” After the execution, families sometimes do not receive the body of their relative or any notification of the burial place.
Amnesty International has documented numerous cases in which the death penalty was seemingly used to oppress activities of political or cultural representatives of Iran’s ethnic minorities, such as the Ahwazi Arab, Azerbaijani, Baluchi or Kurdish minorities.
Iranian authorities have become increasingly suspicious of Ahwazi Arabs following the unrest that broke out in 2005 in the province of Khuzestan. In January 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentences of five members of the Ahwazi Arab minority: Hadi Rashedi, Hashem Sha’bani Amouri, Mohammad Ali Amouri, Sayed Jaber Alboshoka and his brother Sayed Mokhtar Alboshoka. They had been arrested, together with three other men, in early 2011, ahead of the sixth anniversary of the 2005 protests, apparently in connection with their organization of cultural activities. They were sentenced to death in 2012 by a Revolutionary Court after being convicted of charges including “enmity against God”. Prior to their trial, Hadi Rashedi and ashem Sha’bani Amouri were shown “confessing” on a state television channel. On 7 December 2013, both men were transferred to an unknown location from Karoun Prison in Ahvaz, Khuzestan province.58 Four other  Ahwazi Arab men were executed in November or December 2013 following their transfer from Karoun Prison to an unknown location on 3 November.
On one weekend in late October, Iranian authorities carried out 20 executions. Among these was Habibollah Golparipour, a Kurdish minority political prisoner had been arrested in 2009 and sentenced to death in a five-minute trial in 2010 for “enmity against God” (moharebeh) through his alleged cooperation with a banned armed group, the “Party For Free Life of Kurdistan” (PJAK). His family was not notified beforehand. After his execution, the authorities reportedly refused to hand over his body.
In March, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran expressed alarm over the rate of executions, especially in the absence of fair trial standards, the application of capital punishment for offences that do not meet “most serious crimes” standards, and the continuing use of public executions.59 In June, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressed concern that consensual same-sex sexual activity is criminalized and that convicted persons may receive the death penalty.
An Iranian-Canadian man, Hamid Ghassemi-Shall, was released in September and returned to Toronto in October. He and his brother Alborz Ghassemi-Shall had been sentenced to death in 2008 on charges of espionage and cooperation with the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), a political group proscribed in 1981. Hamid Ghassemi-Shall had been convicted of obtaining confidential military information from his brother, who had previously worked as a mechanical engineer in the Iranian army. During successive trial sessions, the men were denied regular access to a lawyer of their choice, obtaining one only when the case was before the Supreme Court. Alborz Ghassemi-Shall died in Evin Prison in Tehran in 2009 under unclear circumstances.
In October a man identified as “Alireza M.”, convicted of drug offences, was reported to have survived a 12-minute hanging in Bojnourd prison in north-east Iran. A doctor had declared him dead, but when the prisoner’s family went to collect his body the following day he was found to be still breathing. In the following days, judges stated that he would be executed again once medical staff confirmed that his health had improved. However, on 23 October Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, Head of the Judiciary, suggested that “Alireza M.” would be able to lodge an application for a pardon from the Supreme Leader.

On 26 October, Ebrahim Hamidi, Justice Chief of Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province, announced that 16 individuals had been executed in response to an attack a day earlier near the border with Pakistan, during which a Sunni armed group allegedly killed 14 border guards. The executed men had been sentenced to death several years earlier, half for their alleged membership in an armed militant group in that province, the other half for drugs offences. No claim was made that the men, imprisoned at the time, had been involved in the border attack.
For the third year in a row, a stark rise in executions was reported in Iraq. At least 169 people were executed, an increase of more than 30% over the known total for 2012 (at least 129) and the highest figure since 2003. The vast majority of executions in recent years are believed to have followed convictions under Article 4 of the Anti-Terrorism Law, Law 13 of 2005. This includes a number of nationals of other predominantly Arab states. The law covers, in vague terms, acts such as provoking, planning, financing, committing or supporting others to commit terrorism. The government claims that the death penalty is needed to confront the high level of attacks by armed groups against civilians. There is no evidence to support the position that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime or attacks. The security situation in the country has actually worsened in recent years. No executions have taken place in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since 2008.
Amnesty international recorded at least 35 death sentences in Iraq, including one woman.
Most were imposed for murder and other killings, but others for non-lethal crimes such as kidnapping or “belonging to a terrorist group”. The real figure is likely to be much higher, as many death sentences are not reported. According to an Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights report published early in the year, criminal courts had pronounced more than 2,600 death sentences between 2004 and 2012, or more than 280 per year on average. Death sentences are often handed down after grossly unfair trials, during which prisoners do not have access to proper legal representation. “Confessions” are frequently extracted through torture or other ill-treatment, which according to credible reports can include electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, being suspended from handcuffs, beatings on the sole of the feet (falaqa) and with a cable or a pistol butt, and use of a drill.
In March, Amnesty International documented 90 cases of death row inmates in Iraq who had been convicted of terrorism or other crimes on the basis of forced “confessions”.61 At least 14 of these 90 prisoners were executed during 2013.
Saudi Arabian national ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam Saleh Musfer al-Qahtani, Iraqi national Safa Ahmad ‘Abul’aziz ‘Abdullah and four other Iraqi nationals had been sentenced to death in March 2011 by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq in Baghdad for an armed raid two years earlier on a goldsmith’s shop in Baghdad during which the owners were killed. The sentences of ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam Saleh Musfer al-Qahtani and Safa Ahmad  Abul’aziz ‘Abdullah were upheld by the Court of Cassation and ratified by the Iraqi Presidency around  September. Both men are held in the Maximum High Security Prison (al-Himaya al-Quswa) at Camp Justice (Mu’askar al-‘Adala) in Baghdad. The four other Iraqi nationals sentenced with them were executed on 2 April 2013.
The six men initially “confessed” to being members of al-Qa’ida and carrying out the raid to raise funds for the organization, but later retracted these statements saying they had made them after torture and other ill-treatment.
Before his conviction, al-Fayha TV broadcast an interview with ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam Saleh Musfer al-Qahtani in which he “confessed” to committing this and other crimes. In February 2013 he told a lawyer that his treatment had included severe beatings, pulling his genitals, burning with cigarettes and partial asphyxiation with a plastic bag. According to their lawyer, one of the men was in detention and the other was not in Iraq at the time of the attack on the shop. However, the court convicted the defendants on the basis of their “confessions”, which had been admitted as evidence despite their allegations of torture and coercion in pre-trial detention.
In statements in September and October, the Iraqi Ministry of Justice stated that all death sentences were reviewed and confirmed by the Court of Cassation before executions took place. However, the generally paper-based procedure does not provide a genuine review, as defendants are limited to written submissions, and the court regularly fails to address the issue of contested evidence such as “confessions” allegedly made following torture and other ill-treatment, and subsequently withdrawn. Hundreds of prisoners are on death row with their sentences ratified by the Presidency, the last formal step before implementation.
Executions are often carried out in large groups, and at very short notice. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated in reaction to the execution of 21 prisoners on the same day in April that the justice system in the country was “too seriously flawed to warrant even a limited application of the death penalty, let alone dozens of executions at a time. Executing people in batches like this is obscene. It is like processing animals in a slaughterhouse.”