More than 400 people, including 15 women, have been executed so far this year in Iran, independent United Nations experts said Monday, alarmed by a sharp increase in the death toll in August.

At least 81 people were executed last month, nearly double the 45 reported to have been executed in July, the experts said in a statement, without disclosing their sources.

The number of executions recorded this year thus exceeded 400, including fifteen women, insisted the group — six UN special rapporteurs and five members of the UN working group against discrimination against women and girls.

The experts, acting under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, do not officially speak on behalf of the international organization.

They yesterday underlined their “deep concern at the large increase in the number of executions” in Iran in August.

About half (42) of the executions were for criminal offenses related to drug trafficking and drug use, they said in their statement, recalling that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—to which the Islamic Republic is a party—restricts the scope of “the death penalty in ‘the most serious crimes’, which is understood to mean premeditated murder”.

“Executions for drug law violations violate international norms,” ​​the experts pointed out.

The UN has repeatedly called on Iran to implement a moratorium on executions ahead of the complete abolition of the death penalty.

In their announcement, they explain that the number of executions for drug cases has increased greatly in Iran since 2021, with more than 400 in 2023, and find that this increase is despite legislative revisions that were, in theory, intended to limit the imposition of capital punishment for offenses of this nature.

Human rights defenders accuse Iranian authorities of using the death penalty as a means of intimidation to suppress the protest movement sparked by the 2022 death of young Mahsha Amini at the hands of the morality police. The 22-year-old, who belonged to the Kurdish minority, was arrested for violating the strict dress code imposed on women in the Islamic Republic.

In their statement, the UN experts condemned the execution of Reza Rasa’i, a Kurdish protester, who was killed on August 6 in Diesel Abad prison in Kermanshah.

His death sentence was imposed “on the basis of a confession extracted from him under torture” in the case of the murder of “an officer of the Revolutionary Guards while participating in an official ceremony”; earlier, Reza Rasa’i participated in a mobilization of people with “posters” in their hands which “inscribed ‘woman, life, freedom'”, they recalled. His sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court “despite his co-accused recanting their statements” implicating him and despite “forensic evidence casting doubt on his involvement” in the murder, the independent experts added.