General Update
In April 2025, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution to continue the Fact-Finding Mission on Iran and significantly broaden the scope of its investigations. The Fact-Finding Mission on Iran was originally established during the authorities’ crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022. The mission will now have the mandate to monitor and investigate allegations of recent and ongoing serious human rights violations; establish the facts, circumstances, and structural causes of such violations; and collect, consolidate, analyse, and preserve evidence of violations with a view to facilitate future legal proceedings. In its March 2025 report, the fact-finding mission found that gross violations of human rights, some of which it found amount to crimes against humanity, are ongoing and recommended continuing investigations into the country’s human rights situation. The extension and expansion of the fact-finding mission illustrates growing international recognition of the need to tackle systematic and structural impunity for human rights violations and crimes under international law.
Human rights organisations, including the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, have been regularly sounding the alarm on systematic human rights abuses in Iran and calling for accountability and transparency in any investigations into these abuses.
Expression
In June 2025, Femena reported on the current war between Israel and Iran that led to the bombing of the Iran state TV and the cutting of Internet access. Since the start of Israel’s airstrikes, the Iranian government began restricting internet access across the country. Authorities claimed the disruptions were necessary to mitigate cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. On the night of 17th June 2025, the restrictions escalated further: the government almost completely shut down access to the global internet, allowing only the state-controlled national intranet to function. This move has drawn sharp criticism from activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens.
On 27th May 2025, Human Rights Watch raised concerns about the “execution spree” being carried out by the Iranian authorities, with at least 113 reported executions taking place in the first 25 days of May 2025 alone. This is reported to be a 75% increase in executions in the first months of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. According to the human rights organisation, the Iranian authorities have been weaponising the death penalty to instil fear and stifle political opposition. For example, in May 2025, 22-year-old Azerbaijani student Ehsan Faridi was sentenced to death on politically motivated charges, vaguely worded as “corruption on earth”.
Human Rights Watch reports that the scope of these executions extends to political dissidents, ethnic minorities and other marginalised communities and that there has been an escalation in the number of women executed. In February 2025, human rights organisations signed a joint action on women HRDs facing execution in Iran, calling on the Iranian judiciary to revoke the death sentences of Pakhshan Azizi, Varisheh Moradi, and others on death row.
The increase in executions is even more concerning given Iran’s extremely poor track record with adhering to fair trial rights and due process. For example, on 21st April 2025, 40-year-old Kurdish prisoner Hamid Hosseinnejad Haydaranlu was executed after being convicted on charges of “armed rebellion” for alleged membership in the Kurdistan Workers' Party and involvement in an operation that resulted in the alleged killing of eight security force members. According to the nongovernmental Kurdistan Human Rights Network, the authorities subjected him to torture to extract confessions and dismissed exculpatory evidence that showed he was not in the country at the time of the alleged offence.
Since January 2024, death row prisoners in Iran have gone on hunger strike every Tuesday as part of what has become known as the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign to protest the wave of executions and to publicly plead for international intervention. Many human rights defenders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, have supported the campaign, including by going on solidarity hunger strikes.