Iran continues brutal hangings of protesters to crush the next uprising

Execution as political infrastructure

Iran’s death penalty system is vast, but the cases that follow protest waves carry a distinct political message. Authorities have used broad national-security charges—including “enmity against God” and “corruption on Earth”—against people accused of taking part in demonstrations or helping protesters. The charge sheet turns a public act of dissent into an offense against the state itself.

After the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began in 2022, the first protest-related executions were carried out with unusual speed. Mohsen Shekari was executed in December 2022 after a Revolutionary Court convicted him over alleged street violence; Majidreza Rahnavard was hanged days later in a publicized case. Their executions, followed by those of Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini in January 2023, made the intended audience unmistakable: people still in the streets, and families considering joining them.

The numbers show a system, not a pause

Independent monitors do not claim to see every execution. Families may be pressured into silence, prisons restrict access, and authorities often announce only selected cases. Even so, the available totals show a sharp rebound after the low counts recorded in 2018–2021. The figures below are minimums from the cited public record, not a claim of perfect enumeration.

How a protest case becomes a death sentence

Revolutionary Courts handle offenses framed as threats to the Islamic Republic. Rights groups have repeatedly criticized these proceedings for closed hearings, restricted access to counsel, forced or disputed confessions, and appeals that do not provide a meaningful remedy. A death sentence can be legally appealed, but a paper appeal is not the same as an independent review.

That distinction is central. When the state calls a protester a security threat, the trial is not only deciding an individual’s fate. It is producing a public lesson about what the state says dissent means. Amnesty International has described Iranian trials in death-penalty cases as deeply flawed, with inadequate protections for defense and commutation.

From street movement to prison corridor

Iranian protest movements have repeatedly outlasted the government’s first crackdown. The state’s response has evolved from mass arrests and lethal force to a slower architecture of surveillance, prosecution, and execution. The timeline below places the recent hangings in that longer cycle.

The human-rights record behind the headlines

Execution totals are only one measure of the crisis. The wider record includes arbitrary detention, torture allegations, discrimination against women and minorities, restrictions on speech, and the use of capital charges after trials that rights groups say fail basic fairness standards.

Iranian authorities reject many outside counts as exaggerated and argue that executions follow lengthy judicial processes, particularly in drug cases. That defense cannot answer the core question in protest cases: whether a person received a genuinely independent, public, and fair determination of guilt before the state took an irreversible step.

Why the hangings are meant to prevent the next uprising

Executions can suppress visible protest in the short term by making every arrest look like a potential death sentence. They also isolate movements: a family fighting for a loved one may be forced into private bargaining, while activists must decide whether helping an injured demonstrator could expose them to the same charges.

But deterrence is not the same as legitimacy. A state that relies on secrecy, forced confessions, and irreversible punishment may win silence without resolving the grievances that produced the protest. The memory of the condemned can become part of the movement’s moral vocabulary—names spoken at memorials, in slogans, and in the next generation’s accounts of what happened.

The most reliable way to interrupt this cycle is not another warning from the gallows. It is due process: independent investigations, access to lawyers, transparent trials, an end to torture and coercion, and international pressure focused on specific people at imminent risk.

Watch the context, not the spectacle

The video below is included as a news reference for the protest and execution context. It is not evidence that every allegation in this article is true, and it is not a substitute for case-level documentation. Viewers should expect discussion of violence and state repression, but no graphic execution imagery is reproduced here.