Iran: “No to Executions Tuesdays” Campaign Continued on its 49th Week
Tuesday December 31, marked the 49th week of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign in 28 prisons across Iran. Launched in February 2024 by political prisoners to oppose the Iranian regime’s repeated use of the death penalty. Riddled with internal, regional and international crises, the Iranian regime has stepped up its killing spree in the last few years. According to the reports tallied by the Iranian Resistance, Tehran has executed at least 1,000 individuals in 86 prisons, including 34 women, seven juvenile offenders, and 119 Baluch minorities. Also, there have been four public hangings. In their statement on their 49th week of campaign, the participant prisoners in the “No to Executions Tuesdays,” wrote: “In a regime where we witness widespread daily executions in various prisons, at least 41 individuals were executed in the first ten days of the Iranian month of Dey (December 21-30), with 23 of them executed in just three days. Many death row prisoners have been transferred to solitary confinement in preparation for their executions.” The executions have increased since the regime’s so-called “moderate” president, Masoud Pezeshkian was selected by supreme leader Ali Khamenei, in a failed sham election that met an unprecedented popular boycott. Despite his claims of reformism, Pezeshkian’s tenure has witnessed hundreds of executions, confirming that as he claimed during his inauguration, that he follows the foot prints of his predecessor Ebrahim Raisi, aka “the Butcher of Tehran,” known for his role in the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners. While referring to the regime’s recent misogynistic and cruel act of sentencing several women to stoning under the alleged charges of “adultery” members of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign underlined: “We believe that silence in the face of such atrocities amounts to complicity and that we must stand against this barbarism and savagery.” They urged the international community to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its crimes against humanity. “As we have repeatedly emphasized, it is evident that the regime resorts to suppression and executions to prevent public protests, and all executions in Iran have a political dimension. Therefore, the members of this campaign once again call on all grassroots and human rights organizations inside and outside the country to make serious efforts to stop executions in Iran,” members of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign implored in their statement on December 24, 2024. In a similar development, political prisoner Saeed Masouri, who has spent 25 years behind bars, wrote a poignant open letter in December 2024, addressing world leaders and the United Nations Officials to take immediate action to stop Tehran’s “killing machine.” “The least that can be done in this regard is to bind this ‘execution government’ to humane and human rights standards by conditioning diplomatic and political interactions on halting this killing machine in hopes that the massacres will cease.”



