Iranians Protest in 19 Cities Worldwide with the Slogan 'Uprising Against Executions'

A large number of Iranian protesters demonstrated on Saturday simultaneously in over 19 different cities across Europe and North America to express their opposition to the death penalty, chanting 'Uprising Against Executions.' In Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, some Iranians held placards with messages against the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guard, chanting slogans in Swedish. Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, recently called for an immediate halt to executions in Iran in his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council regarding the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic. According to Guterres's report, the execution of 582 Iranians in 2022 indicates a 75% increase in the number of executions compared to the previous year, which was 333. Shirin Ebadi, Mehrangiz Kar, Ghasem Shole Saadi, Mohammad Oliaei-Fard, Hossein Raeisi, and Saeed Dehghan sent a letter to Guterres on Tuesday, June 8, calling for 'control or limitation' of the death penalty in Iran and other countries. Additionally, Amnesty International recently described the tripling of drug-related executions in Iran as 'shameful' and reported that 173 people have been executed under the pretext of drug crimes since the beginning of the calendar year, with most of these individuals lacking access to a fair trial. Raha Bahreini, a researcher on Iran at Amnesty International, previously stated to the Persian section of Voice of America that the Islamic Republic has many people on death row and that global pressure to combat this must increase. The UN Human Rights Council emphasized that the human rights situation in Iran has worsened.