Iran’s Noose Tightens as Protester Executions Surge While International Protests Fall on Deaf Ears

Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani was hanged at age 24, yet not before one last visit with his family. His mother, herself serving a prison sentence, was let out of custody just long enough to say goodbye to her son and to the nephew she’d helped raise, Alireza Sepahi, who was condemned alongside him.Iran’s judiciary had convicted the two cousins of moharebeh, or “enmity against God,” and efsad-fil-arz, or “corruption on Earth.” They were accused of arson and possession of firearms and Molotov cocktails in connection with the deaths of four security officers during widespread protests on January 8, 2026.Mr. Badjani was hanged in public in Isfahan’s Alikhani Square alongside Amirhossein Safari, 27, before dawn, under heavy security, as onlookers who had gathered overnight chanted against the executioners.Alireza Sepahi had been set to hang beside them. But he suffered a heart attack en route to the execution site and was resuscitated at Al-Zahra Hospital before being sent back to Dastgerd Prison. The reprieve didn’t hold. His lawyer said the Supreme Court approved a retrial this month, but a parallel Revolutionary Court branch rejected it without a hearing and sent the case to the sentence-enforcement branch — putting him back on track for execution.These deaths are far from isolated. Nine days earlier, two other defendants in the same case, Erfan Esfandiari and Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi, were hanged in public, and at least 60 more people convicted in connection with January’s uprising are now living under a death sentence that could be carried out without warning.This is part of what monitors call a new, darker phase of the crackdown. How many more names will cross President Trump’s Truth Social feed before Washington moves past the repost?A Death Row Built on Vague ChargesIranian authorities have leaned heavily this year on broadly worded national security charges, including espionage and collaboration with hostile states, to convict and sentence to death people arrested during the January unrest in which security forces killed thousands of persons protesting economic conditions.“Since the beginning of the year, they have arbitrarily executed at least 26 people convicted of offenses in connection with the January 2026 protests, following torture-tainted, grossly unfair trials by Revolutionary Courts,” the advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International USA, Elizabeth Rghebi, tells The New York Sun.“The Iranian authorities are unleashing a horrifying wave of executions and death sentences to punish and suppress dissent and project an image of strength and absolute control in the wake of the January popular uprising and amid ongoing attacks by US and Israeli forces.”At least 60 more people, including three who were arrested as children, are now at risk of execution after being sentenced to death.Many others still face capital charges tied to the protests, the organization says, underscoring that its findings are drawn from interviews with roughly a dozen sources, including relatives of the condemned living outside Iran and lawyers still working inside the country. Those findings are cross-referenced against Iranian state media and official statements.“Over the past five months, Iran’s authorities have further escalated their weaponization of the death penalty as a tool of political repression,” a senior Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, Bahar Saba, tells the Sun.“Over 50 people, including individuals arrested in connection with recent protests, some as young as 18 and 19, have been arbitrarily executed on politically motivated and vague national security charges since March 18. These executions have come after grossly unfair trials, before courts that lack independence and systematically rely on ‘confessions’ extracted under torture and in the absence of lawyers.”Ms. Saba says the July 28 public hanging of the two men in Isfahan marks an escalation from the 2025 tally, which was already the highest recorded in Iran since the 1980s. Between August 23 and 26, another 23 prisoners — including three women — were executed, a rate rights monitors described as nearly one every four hours.Ms. Saba notes that Human Rights Watch has pressed foreign judicial authorities to open their own criminal investigations into Iranian officials under the principle of universal jurisdiction, arguing that impunity for those responsible is what keeps the killing going.The killings tied to national security charges have only sped up since the war with Israel and the United States began on February 28. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, said this month his agency has documented at least 59 executions on national-security charges since March 2026, already more than were put to death on the same charges in all of last year. More than 100 others are still waiting to learn their fate.Nearly all of the death sentences, rights groups say, stem from confessions extracted under torture, followed by trials that last weeks rather than months before a defendant is hanged.Among those still waiting for a sentence is Arman Marefati, held at Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj, whose two co-defendants were secretly hanged in June without any warning to their families or lawyers. Three of the roughly 60 people Amnesty says are now at risk of execution were arrested as children.So, can anyone outside Iran actually stop this?Trump’s Online CampaignPresident Trump has made the executions a recurring feature of his social media output, reposting photographs of condemned and executed protesters and demanding the killings stop.After Iran executed Erfan Esfandiari and Gol Mohammad Mohammadi on July 19, Mr. Trump reposted a message about Mr. Mohammadi’s death, adding his own commentary calling the Iranian officials responsible “savages.”Mr. Trump’s online interventions have, at times, coincided with reprieves — most notably in April, when he credited Tehran with sparing eight women protesters after he publicly urged their release. Iranian officials have pushed back on previous such claims: When Mr. Trump said Iran had canceled more than 800 scheduled executions at his request, the country’s top prosecutor called that “completely false” and said the judiciary takes no instructions from foreign powers.On August 25, Mr. Trump renewed his criticism in even more direct terms, writing on Truth Social that “the failing Islamic Republic of Iran is not paying large segments of their military, while at the same time killing protesters, even when they are not protesting, at levels not seen before.” He said the pattern is “a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, and must be stopped, now.”The post came days after 32 countries signed a joint statement condemning Tehran’s use of executions to silence dissent. Whether that kind of pressure can actually stop a hanging is another matter.A Muted World, a Regime EmboldenedLegal scholars say the divide between Mr. Trump’s online outrage and any real diplomatic follow-through from Washington or its allies has given Tehran little reason to change course“Iran has a long history with executions,” a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, Austin Sarat, tells the Sun.He says the war with Israel and the United States functioned less as the spark for the crackdown than as fuel for one already lit by the January protests. The conflict is “putting a little bit of an accelerant into something that’s already pretty flammable,” he says.Mr. Sarat is also skeptical that Mr. Trump’s public statements reflect any real American policy on the issue.“The president of the United States is himself enthusiastic for executions, and the administration has said nothing about human rights abuses, let alone execution practices around the world,” he continues, noting that Washington’s credibility with ordinary Iranians has been badly damaged by its handling of the current conflict with Tehran.He argues the administration’s handling of the war has cost it much of its standing to press Tehran on the issue and that any meaningful outside pressure, if it comes at all, is more likely to originate in Europe than in Washington.The executions themselves, experts say, serve as a familiar tool for a government trying to project strength while it feels threatened from within.Mr. Sarat says both the threat and the act of execution are familiar tools for repressive regimes, and that Iran’s leadership appears to be treating the moment as an existential test of its own survival — one in which it intends to preserve the essential character of the regime regardless of outside criticism. He does not expect any push for restraint from Iran’s allies, chief among them China, which is believed to carry out thousands of executions of its own each year behind a wall of state secrecy.For the families of the 60 or more Iranians now sitting on death row over their alleged roles in January’s uprising, the question is no longer whether the world is watching. Mr. Trump’s Truth Social posts have made sure of that. The question, as it was after 800 supposedly canceled executions and the reported sparing of eight women, is whether the attention translates into anything more than another post that falls by the wayside as negotiations stop and start.“The muted response from the international community emboldens the Iranian authorities,” Ms. Rghebi adds, calling on U.N. member states to “take urgent coordinated diplomatic action to press the Iranian authorities to halt further executions.”

Iran’s Noose Tightens as Protester Executions Surge While International Protests Fall on Deaf Ears

Iran’s Noose Tightens as Protester Executions Surge While International Protests Fall on Deaf Ears

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