Somewhere in Iran right now, a teenager is sitting on death row for something that happened when they were seventeen, maybe younger. Their trial lasted a few weeks, sometimes less. There was no real chance to challenge the confession, even when that confession was beaten out of them. This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s happening on a scale most people outside Iran have no idea about, and it’s part of why Verein Welle exists to make sure these cases don’t disappear into silence.
We want to walk through what’s actually going on, because the numbers alone are hard to process, and the human side of this gets lost fast.
The scale of what’s happening right now
Start with the raw figures, because they set the stage for everything else. Iran executed at least 1,639 people in 2025. That’s a 68% jump from the year before, and it’s the highest yearly total the country has recorded since 1989. Some counts put the full 2025–2026 period even higher, above 2,600 executions, with December 2025 alone accounting for close to 400 of them.
Sit with that for a second. Nearly 400 executions in a single month.
And even those numbers are almost certainly too low. Over 90% of executions in Iran aren’t officially announced. Families often only learn what happened after the fact, sometimes not at all. Human rights organizations piece the real total together through smuggled reports, prisoner networks, and local sources willing to risk a lot to get information out. So when you see a figure like “1,639,” treat it as a floor, not a ceiling.
Why the numbers spiked
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. In January 2026, nationwide protests broke out across Iran. The government’s response was mass arrests, and in the months since, executions tied to those protests have climbed sharply. Rights groups tracking the situation say the pace only got worse once Iran’s conflict with Israel began in February 2026 the wartime security climate gave authorities cover to push executions through even faster, with even less scrutiny.
That’s the pattern worth understanding: executions in Iran aren’t only about crime and punishment in the way most people think of it. They’re also a tool. A fast, visible way to discourage people from protesting again. When a government wants to send a message that resistance has consequences, the courtroom becomes part of the machinery.
There’s also a practical reason the numbers are so hard to pin down precisely. Iran has repeatedly restricted internet access during periods of unrest, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. That kind of shutdown does two things at once it makes it harder for protesters to organize, and it makes it much harder for anyone outside the country to find out what’s happening to the people who get arrested. A lot of what we know about individual cases comes out in fragments, weeks or months after the fact, once a family member or lawyer manages to get word out through channels that aren’t being monitored.
Children are part of this
Here’s where it gets harder to look away from. Among those swept up in the post uprising crackdown are minors some as young as 17 facing the death penalty for offenses tied to the January 2026 protests. Some of these cases involve accusations connected to violence against security personnel during the unrest. The trials move fast. Weeks, not months, from arrest to sentencing. Confessions extracted under conditions that would never hold up in a court with real oversight.
This is legal under Iranian law, which is part of the problem. Iran’s Islamic Penal Code sets the age of criminal responsibility at 15 for boys and just 9 for girls. Below that threshold, a child can be sentenced to death for a capital offense, the same as an adult would be. There’s a provision that’s supposed to let judges account for a young person’s mental maturity before handing down a death sentence, but in practice it hasn’t stopped much. At least 8 juvenile offenders were executed in the most recent reporting year, up from 7 the year before. The trend line is not moving in the right direction.
Iran executes more juvenile offenders than any other country on earth. Not close to it more than any other country. That’s not a statistic you can soften.
What makes this especially frustrating is that Iran’s own Supreme Court acknowledged over a decade ago that child offenders on death row could apply for a retrial based on updated mental maturity assessments. That door has technically been open since 2014. In practice, it hasn’t slowed the pace of executions in any meaningful way, and lawyers representing juvenile defendants describe a system where the retrial process is more theoretical than real available on paper, rarely followed through on in a courtroom that’s already decided the outcome.
If you’re wondering how you can actually do something about this instead of just reading about it, How to Donate lays out exactly where the money goes and how it’s used to support legal defense, documentation, and advocacy for people at risk.
Why this keeps happening despite being illegal under international law
Iran has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That treaty is unambiguous: no death penalty for crimes committed by anyone under 18, full stop, no exceptions for the type of charge. Iran signed onto that obligation and continues to violate it anyway, year after year.
International bodies have said as much. The UN has expressed what it calls serious concern more than once. But concern, on its own, doesn’t stop an execution. There’s no enforcement mechanism that reaches into an Iranian prison and halts a hanging. What actually moves the needle, when it moves at all, is sustained public pressure international attention loud enough and specific enough that authorities calculate the cost of going through with an execution outweighs the benefit.
That’s not a guarantee. Plenty of cases don’t get saved. But it’s the only lever that’s ever worked, even partially, and it only works when people outside Iran actually know these cases exist.
What documentation actually accomplishes
It’s worth explaining why organizations like ours spend so much time just collecting and verifying information, because it can look from the outside like documentation alone doesn’t do much. In a country where the government controls the narrative and shuts down internet access for extended stretches, getting accurate information out is itself an act of resistance.
Every verified case, every report sent to a UN mechanism, every petition signature adds to a paper trail that makes it harder for a government to claim these things aren’t happening, or that they’re isolated incidents rather than a pattern. It also gives international journalists and diplomats something concrete to work with instead of vague appeals.
If you’ve got questions about a specific case, or you’re a journalist or researcher looking for more detail than a blog post can cover, our Contact page has direct ways to reach our team.
The part that doesn’t get said enough
We’re not going to pretend every case has a happy ending, because most don’t. International pressure sometimes delays an execution. Occasionally it leads to a retrial or a commuted sentence. But plenty of names on these lists don’t make it into international headlines at all, and the sentence gets carried out with almost no outside world ever knowing it happened.
That’s the uncomfortable truth behind this work. It’s not a campaign with guaranteed wins. It’s closer to trying to hold a door shut against something that keeps pushing back, case by case, knowing you won’t win all of them.
But the alternative silence guarantees nothing gets stopped. At least with documentation, advocacy, and public pressure, some of these young people get a chance they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Some death sentences do get commuted. Some executions do get delayed long enough for circumstances to change. That’s not nothing, even if it’s far from everything.
Where this leaves us
Iran’s execution numbers keep climbing, and children keep showing up in that count. The legal framework that allows it hasn’t changed in any meaningful way despite years of international criticism. What has changed is how fast trials move and how little scrutiny they get, especially since the crackdown that followed January 2026’s protests.
None of that is likely to shift because of one blog post. But awareness is the first ingredient in pressure, and pressure is the only thing that’s ever made a difference in individual cases. If this is the first time you’re hearing real numbers instead of vague headlines, that’s the point now you know, and you can decide what to do with it.
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