At least 94 people were executed by Iranian authorities in January and February alone, human rights group Amnesty International said Thursday.

Research by Amnesty and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights advocacy group, has shown that Iranian authorities have notably executed minorities—at least 14 Kurds, 13 Baloch and at least one Ahwazi Arab—after they were sentenced to death in “grossly unfair trials”, while they sentenced more than ten others to the death penalty in the first two months of the year.

The two NGOs point out that the number of executions increased dramatically compared to the corresponding period last year. In a joint statement, citing sources in the country, they also refer to “horrific sexual violence and other allegations of torture”.

“Iranian authorities are carrying out executions on a terrifying scale,” said Roya Boroumand, executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center.

It is, he added, “an attack on the right to life and a shameless attempt not only to further oppress national minorities, but to spread the fear that dissent will be met with brute force, either on the streets or on the scaffold.”

“It is appalling that such frequent executions are taking place amid the systematic use of ‘confessions’ extracted by torture to convict defendants in grossly unfair trials,” said Amnesty International’s Diana Eltahawi, calling “all states” to proceed with their “exercise of global jurisdiction”, to prosecute “all Iranian officials” suspected of having committed “crimes under international law” and “gross violations of human rights”.

Human rights groups have complained for years that the death penalty is a means of repression and is imposed after unfair trials in Iran.

There is no official data on the number of executions in the Islamic Republic. According to Amnesty International, at least 250 people were killed in the first half of 2022 in Iran, following convictions mainly for drug trafficking or drug use cases.

Iranian authorities have also executed at least four people for crimes they say were committed during the wave of mass protests since September 2022, sparked by the death at the hands of morality police of Mahsha Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, on 16 September. .

The death penalty in Iran is mainly by hanging.

According to Amnesty International and other NGOs, Iran ranks second in the world for the use of the death penalty, behind only China.