Iran's Courts Stopped Trying Protesters One at a Time. Now They Kill Them in Batches.

Ahad Shokouhian spent, by his own account and by CCTV footage his lawyer says confirms it, less than two minutes near the door of a mosque during the January 2026 protests in Pakdasht. He is a 38-year-old flower-market worker who cares for his disabled brother and his 80-year-old mother. He has severe asthma. Iran's Revolutionary Court has sentenced him to death three times. He is the third of twelve defendants tried together in a single case, with the judge, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), never separating their individual conduct or evidence at all. The first defendant got four death sentences. Nobody in that courtroom was tried as an individual human being — they were tried as a headcount.

This is the innovation Tehran has landed on after a year of nationwide unrest: mass trials that convert protest into a conveyor belt toward the gallows. CHRI's August report documents cases in Pakdasht, Isfahan's Alikhani and Shohada squares, and Esfarayen where dozens of defendants — including at least one 16-year-old — face collective death sentences after proceedings that deny separate defense, exclude exculpatory evidence, and rely on confessions extracted under torture, some broadcast on state TV. Four people from these specific cases have already been executed, two of them in public. This isn't a judiciary processing crime. It's a state processing dissent at industrial scale, and doing it loudly enough that the message reaches every kitchen table in the country: this is the price.

The scale only makes sense against the backdrop. Iran's yearly execution count has been climbing for years — hundreds in the late 2010s, into the 800s by 2023, over 900 in 2024, and by Amnesty's count over 1,000 confirmed executions in 2025 alone, with some tallies putting the real 2025 figure above 1,600 once unconfirmed cases are included. That trajectory is the backdrop the January 2026 crackdown lands on: a state that was already executing more people, per year, than any other government on earth, now discovering that grouping death sentences by dozens is more efficient than handing them out one case at a time.

Iran is also quietly disassembling the profession that could push back. CHRI counted at least 32 lawyers arrested, summoned, prosecuted or imprisoned in the first five months of 2026 alone — attorneys sentenced to years in prison for "assembly and collusion against national security," summoned for merely discussing a death-row client's case publicly, banned from travel, stripped of the ability to practice. Shokouhian's own lawyer wasn't allowed to see his case file until after the Supreme Court had already reviewed it. When you can't get a lawyer into the room, "trial" is theater, and the group format just makes the theater cheaper to stage.

None of this is abstract to us. Every state that manufactures a national-security pretext to fast-track dissidents through courts stripped of due process is running the same playbook fascists everywhere reach for — collapse the individual into the group, collapse the group into a threat, and let the threat justify whatever comes next. Solidarity here isn't a hashtag; it's naming the mechanism (group prosecution, coerced confession, disappeared lawyer) so it can be tracked, documented, and made to cost the regime something internationally. The people we should be listening to are the ones like Shokouhian, recording pleas from inside Ghezel Hesar Prison, asking to be someone's voice because his own has nowhere left to go.

Sources

CHRI: Iran's New Weapon: Group Prosecutions of Protesters Send Dozens Toward the Gallows

CHRI: Iran Intensifies Assault on Independent Lawyers Amid Expanding Post-War Crackdown

Wikipedia: Capital punishment in Iran (execution statistics by year)

Amnesty International: Global Report on Death Sentences and Executions 2025