Iran’s Surge of Executions Drives World Total to Highest Level Since 1981

The numbers arrived in mid-May with the kind of cold specificity that resists easy dismissal: 2,707 people were executed by governments across the globe in 2025, a 78-percent spike over the year before and the highest toll recorded since 1981.Amnesty International’s annual Death Sentences and Executions report, released May 17, mapped a world in which state-sanctioned killing is not a relic of a crueler era but an accelerating practice, in most cases driven by governments with little tolerance for scrutiny and even less for dissent.The figure covers 17 countries and represents a huge jump from the 1,518 executions recorded in 2024. It is almost certainly an undercount; it does not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty believes continued in China, nor the extensive use of the death penalty in North Korea and Vietnam, where state secrecy makes any accounting nearly impossible. The body count the world does know about is dramatic enough.“Each of these high-executing countries has their own story and their own procedures,” a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, Austin Sarat, tells The New York Sun. “Often the spike in executions is driven by some political event. For example, there are demonstrations, an uprising in Tehran, and the government responds by executing.”Iran’s killing machineIranian authorities were, in fact, the main drivers behind last year’s spike, executing at least 2,159 people which is more than twice the number of people put to death in that country in 2024. That total accounted for 80 percent of all recorded executions last year and, on its own, eclipses all the world’s recorded executions the previous year.At least 998 of the Iranian executions documented by Amnesty International last year were tied to narcotics charges. According to Iran Human Rights and ECPM, only 113 executions — less than 7 percent of the total — were officially announced by Iranian authorities, down from 9.7 percent the year before. The rest were documented through monitoring networks inside the country, death notices smuggled out of prisons, and testimony from families who buried their relatives in secret.Women, minorities, political prisoners, and the poor constitute the main victims. Three major prisons serve as Iran’s primary execution hubs, with Qezel Hesar in Karaj functioning as a center for political and security-related cases.Human rights organizations note that many of those executed were convicted in proceedings that denied them independent legal counsel, permitted coerced confessions, and offered no meaningful avenue for appeal. The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, has warned that the scale and pace of executions suggests a systematic use of capital punishment as a tool of state intimidation, with disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities and migrants.Iran Human Rights has called on the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission on Iran, whose mandate was extended in January, to investigate the executions as crimes against humanity, a characterization that the independent mission has said may be warranted.Elsewhere, the global picture last year was largely stable, according to a professor of international law at Middlesex University, William Schabas.“If you remove Iran from the global calculation, the number of executions was virtually the same in 2025 as in 2024,” he explains. “The global increase, almost entirely attributable to Iran, is easily explained by the political turmoil there over the past year.”Mr. Sarat says that the machinery in Iran operates on a different logic than in the West.“Once someone gets a death sentence in the United States, that’s really just the beginning of a long, often drawn-out process, and most people who receive death sentences are never executed,” he observes. “In places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, that is not the case. You get a death sentence, and there is very little between you and execution.”Saudi Arabia, drugs, and the China questionIran may have driven the headline number; however, it was hardly alone. Saudi authorities executed at least 356 people in 2025, setting a new record for the highest number of executions in a single year since monitoring began. It is the second consecutive year that the kingdom has set a new record.Of those executed, 240 were convicted of nonlethal drug-related offenses, and 188 were foreign nationals, the latter figure representing a record share of those put to death in a single year. Analysts have largely attributed the surge to a continuing war on drugs, with many of those first arrested only now reaching execution following legal proceedings and convictions.A spokesperson for Reprieve, a London-based human rights group that campaigns against the death penalty, tells the Sun the timing is no accident.“Over the years, we have seen that the Saudi regime executes more people when it sees an opportunity to do so without international condemnation,” the spokesperson tells the Sun. “It’s not a coincidence that the two bloodiest years of executions in the kingdom’s modern history have happened while the world’s attention has been on Gaza, then Iran.”Close to half of all known executions globally — 1,257 in total, or 46 percent — were for drug-related offenses, which do not meet the threshold of “most serious crimes” under international law. Five countries carried out executions for drug offenses: China, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. The Reprieve spokesperson argues the trend reflects a failure of policy masquerading as resolve.“Very sadly, we have observed that in some states, politicians see the death penalty as an easy fix to tackle drug usage, but the increase in trafficking demonstrates the failure of an enforcement approach,” the representative says. “It disproportionately affects marginalized individuals and scapegoats vulnerable groups like migrant workers. The international community can no longer stand aside and let the poor pay the price.”Mr. Schabas points to a deeper contradiction at the heart of the drug execution logic.“The strange irony is that these countries justify resorting to the death penalty on the ground that it is allegedly an effective deterrent. But if it is such a great deterrent, why do they continue to increase the number of executions year on year?” he asks.“If it really deterred drug trafficking then one would expect the number of convictions, and the ensuing executions, to decline,” he says. “The fact is that there is no criminological evidence to confirm that the death penalty is a deterrent that is any more effective than lengthy incarceration.”That brings the conversation to the largest and least knowable variable in the entire accounting: China. The Chinese government classifies death penalty cases as state secrets, leaving advocacy organizations unable to accurately assess the number of death sentences approved by the Supreme People’s Court each year, estimated to be in the thousands.Human rights organizations believe China executes more people annually than every other country on earth combined, yet the international community has little hard evidence on which to base a response.“The fact that the Chinese government has not made its death penalty figures publicly known for all these years, and instead deepened state secrecy over them, illustrates its deep and intensifying animosity toward basic human rights standards,” the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, Maya Wang, tells the Sun.Invisibility also compounds the problem.“In part, there isn’t more of a spotlight because we don’t know very much about what happens there; it’s hard to put a spotlight on something that’s relatively invisible,” says Mr. Sarat. “Iranian and Saudi executions are public. In China, unfortunately, they are not.”Mr. Schabas, who visited China twice in the past year, stresses that reliable information has become harder, not easier, to obtain.“My contacts there, mainly academics, are aware that it goes on but don’t appear to have any information that it is increasing,” he asserts. “Several years ago, there were serious efforts in China to reduce the number of executions, by requiring that the highest courts confirm all capital sentences. But right now, nobody seems to know what is going on.”America’s positionFor the 17th consecutive year, the United States was the only country in the Western Hemisphere to execute people. It carried out 47 executions across 11 states in 2025, nearly doubling the previous year’s figure of 25, with Florida leading the count at 19, more than the state’s previous modern record and more than Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina combined. The national total was the highest in 16 years.The crimes for which those men died dated largely from an earlier era, a reminder that American death row operates on a decades-long clock. Among those executed was Frank Walls, 58, put to death in Florida for a 1987 home invasion in which he killed two people, though he later confessed to three others. In Texas, Blaine Milam was executed for a killing that occurred in 2008.In Alabama, Anthony Boyd, 54, was put to death by nitrogen gas for a 1993 kidnapping and murder, maintaining his innocence until the end, with a dissent from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor among the last legal interventions filed on his behalf. Fifteen of the 47 people executed — 32 percent — were people of color, including 13 Black men, while just 15 percent of the cases that resulted in execution involved victims of color.The federal government carried out 13 executions during President Trump’s first term, three times as many as it had carried out in the previous six decades, and during Mr. Trump’s second term has continued signaling enthusiasm for expanding capital punishment’s scope. Most recently, the Justice Department announced it would seek the death penalty for Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man charged with the antisemitic murders of Israeli diplomat Yaron Lischinsky and American Embassy staffer Sarah Milgrim outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington in May 2025.The United States was not alone in its return to the execution chamber.Four countries resumed executions in 2025 after a hiatus: Japan, South Sudan, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates. At the end of 2025, 113 countries were fully abolitionist and 145 had abolished the death penalty in law or practice.The White House has made its position clear: on his first day in office in 2025, Mr. Trump signed an executive order resuming federal executions paused under President Biden.“Capital punishment is an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens,” Mr. Trump wrote in his order.Efforts by politicians and judges to undermine capital punishment “defy the laws of our nation, make a mockery of justice, and insult the victims of these horrible crimes,” he said. “The Government’s most solemn responsibility is to protect its citizens from abhorrent acts, and my Administration will not tolerate efforts to stymie and eviscerate the laws that authorize capital punishment against those who commit horrible acts of violence against American citizens.”The Justice Department has since signaled it will seek the death penalty not only in murder cases but also for capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and for the killing of law enforcement officers.Mr. Sarat contends that in pursuing the death penalty, the United States has forfeited whatever moral authority it once claimed on the issue.“The current administration wants to ramp up its use, so it’s hardly in a position to criticize other nations,” he says. “The United States can criticize Iran for extrajudicial killings and slaughtering protesters, but when it comes to the formal meting out of death sentences, the United States is in no position to tell anyone else not to do it.”Yet, overall, Mr. Sarat sees the long arc bending toward abolition regardless of the current moment.“The number of new death sentences in the United States is way down, from around 300 a year in the 1990s to roughly 20 or 25 last year,” he says. “Public support for the death penalty has dropped from around 80 percent to the low 50s, and drops further when people are asked whether they’d prefer a death sentence or life without parole. The United States is on the road to abolition of the death penalty. The progress will be two steps forward, one step back.”

Iran’s Surge of Executions Drives World Total to Highest Level Since 1981

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