Iran Is Executing Its Own Protesters by the Dozen — and the World Calls It Diplomacy

In January 2026, Iranians rose up against a regime that answered with live ammunition, killing what human rights monitors estimate ran into the thousands over two nights. Nine months on, the state has moved from massacre in the street to something colder and more bureaucratic: an execution machine dressed up as a court system, working through the survivors one show trial at a time.

Amnesty International documented the pattern in detail this year. Public executions of protesters arrested in Esfahan in January, mass trials with dozens of co-defendants, charges like "enmity against God" and "corruption on earth" that exist specifically to let a Revolutionary Court skip the burden of proving anyone actually did anything. Iran Human Rights counts more than 70 people from a single Esfahan prison alone now sentenced to death over the January protests. The UN's own fact-finding mission begged Tehran to halt ten of those executions before two men were hanged anyway, days after the plea.

This is not incidental cruelty. It is the point. A regime that cannot suppress an uprising through force alone manufactures a legal apparatus to finish the job in private, on a schedule, with paperwork. The Ministry of Intelligence's July list naming over 400 organizations and outlets as "hostile" under an espionage law is the other half of the same strategy: criminalize the people documenting the killings while killing the people who protested them. Ashkan Maleki and Mehrdad Mohammadinia, both Kurdish, were executed in secret in June without their families or lawyers being told in advance — the state doesn't even pretend due process applies to its own laws anymore.

Western governments will make the appropriate noises about human rights while continuing arms deals, oil purchases, and diplomatic tracks that treat this as a regrettable side issue to the "real" business of geopolitics. That's not an accident of priorities, it's the standard operating procedure of every state system: capital and its clients tolerate an execution rate as a rounding error next to a stable trading partner. The Iranian state is not an aberration in the world order, it is a particularly blunt demonstration of what every state reserves the right to do to people who threaten its monopoly on force — the difference is one of scale and confidence, not of kind.

Solidarity here isn't abstract. It means naming the dead, refusing to let "stability" language launder a hanging, and rejecting any framing — from Tehran or from Washington — that turns street protesters into either terrorists or geopolitical footballs. The people in Esfahan's death rows went into the street in January against a state that answers dissent with rope. That's the whole story. Everything else is a regime and its foreign interlocutors trying to make you look away.

Sources

Amnesty International: Iran must end escalating campaign of arbitrary executions
UN News: Sharp spike in executions, death sentences in Iran
Iran Human Rights: Group prosecutions send dozens toward the gallows
Wikipedia: 2025–2026 Iranian protests