ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran executed at least 168 people in the first five months of this year, compared to 110 people between the same period last year, a rights organization reported on Wednesday, marking a significant increase.
Iranian authorities executed at least 168 people in the first five months of 2022, according to Oslo-headquartered Iran Human Rights Organization (IHR). The report added that Baloch prisoners have accounted for more than 25 percent of this year's executions.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of IHR, claimed that the majority of victims come from the lower-class segment of society, adding that "execution is the most important political tool of the government to suppress and intimidate society."
Iran on Wednesday also sentenced eight prisoners charged with "robbery" to death following their earlier sentence of the severing of four fingers from their right hands, the Paris-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) said.
The sentence of the aforementioned detainees was postponed to another time, but KHRN warns of their imminent executions.
Amnesty International said in May that global executions in 2021 rose by 20 percent, with Iran topping the list for state-sanctioned killings over the past five years, as it recorded its highest execution figure since 2017 with 314 people executed.
In its annual report from 2021, Amnesty stated that "the death penalty was imposed after unfair trials, including for offences not meeting the threshold of the “most serious crimes” such as drug-trafficking and financial corruption, and for acts not internationally recognized as crimes. Death sentences were used as a weapon of repression against protesters, dissidents and ethnic minorities."
Iran remains one of the globe's biggest enforcers of the death penalty, with the execution rate particularly rising since President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August 2021.
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