The three protagonists in the Gulf conflict – Iran, Israel and the USA – have little in common, but they share a growing enthusiasm for the death penalty. Iran has ramped up its executions of activists during the war. Israel recently passed a law that makes hanging the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks. In the USA, several states that use lethal injection are returning to an even more brutal method, the firing squad. Globally, the number of states carrying out death sentences has shrunk to a record low, but those that persist with executions are killing more. Civil society continues to campaign for abolition and, failing that, moratoriums on the death penalty.

Iran’s lethal crackdown

Iran’s theocratic regime has intensified its violent crackdown in response to recent waves of mass protests and the two latest bouts of war initiated by Israel and the USA. Executions are central to its repression. Authorities torture people until they make false confessions, impose death sentences for vaguely defined offences and carry out secret hangings. A politicised court system pays no heed when people retract forced confessions, and once a sentence has been handed down, an execution can follow at any time, with no warning to families. The state has sentenced children to death.

Iran has executed 424 people so far this year, an average of two a day. Injustice moves quickly: among those recently killed are people detained during protests in January. For families, punishment continues after death. Authorities may refuse to release bodies, doing so only when relatives promise to stay silent. The death penalty is explicitly one component of a larger strategy of coercion designed to subdue anyone who might threaten the regime’s survival.

On the opposite side of the conflict, Bahrain has followed Iran in intensifying its crackdown on dissent, including through death sentences. Its government also extracts confessions through torture and can impose the death penalty for espionage, treason and terrorism, charges it routinely levels against political prisoners. All 12 people currently on death row are political prisoners. As in Iran, the sentences carry the message that dissent won’t be tolerated.

Israel’s apartheid death penalty

Israel operates a two-tier justice system, with different rules and standards for Israelis and Palestinians. In March, parliament approved a law that takes these double standards to their logical conclusion, making death by hanging the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of terrorist killings. The architect is far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, previously convicted of crimes including supporting a terrorist organisation and inciting racism. He was among the politicians who wore noose-shaped badges when they voted for the law.

The law’s wording essentially makes it impossible for Israelis to be executed. It makes death the default penalty for terrorist killing verdicts in military courts, which only try Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank. Civilian courts in Israel can also impose the death sentence by majority decision, with no need for unanimity, even when the prosecutor hasn’t sought it.

The law is intentionally cruel. Those sentenced are to be held in a special facility with no family or legal visits, and with lawyers reachable only by video link. They will be hanged within 90 days of sentencing. The law provides no possibility of pardon.

Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have condemned the law. United Nations (UN) human rights chief Volker Türk has said that applying it in illegally occupied territories would constitute a war crime, and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has concluded that it’s racially discriminatory. Civil society groups have filed legal challenges and will be hoping the courts stand up to the government.

The law extends the existing structure of apartheid and comes from the same impulse as the genocide in Gaza. It is part of a broader campaign to dehumanise Palestinians and deny them the most basic rights, including the right to life. It sits at the apex of a system in which Israel currently detains close to 10,000 Palestinians and subjects them to sexual assault, torture, violence and other human rights violations.

Cruelty in the USA

Cruelty is the intention in the USA too. This month, Idaho made death by firing squad its principal method of execution, becoming the seventh US state to authorise it. In April, the federal government announced plans to reintroduce the firing squad for cases under its jurisdiction.

Proponents argue that lethal injections can go wrong. As international suppliers have refused to supply the most effective drugs needed for the procedure, domestic substitutes have increased the risks. They claim death by firing squad is more humane, since precise targeting kills within seconds. But there have been many cases where the method has led to slow and agonising deaths, violating the US Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Historically, there have been instances of firing squads deliberately missing the target to prolong suffering.

The revival of firing squads is part of the performative cruelty routinely deployed by the Trump administration, also on show in its militarised round-ups of migrants, its killings of people on alleged ‘drug boats’ in the Caribbean and its destruction of the international aid programme that has already caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Death penalty decisions are deeply political. Executions have risen fastest in Florida, arguably the most Donald Trump-aligned state.

Unlike Iran, the USA isn’t using executions to target protesters and others who speak out, and unlike Israel, its execution policies aren’t part of a bigger apartheid structure. But executions take place within a justice system compromised by class and racial bias, in a politically polarised country where extremist politicians compete to be toughest on crime, a competition now extending to protest and other acts of dissent. Black people are most at risk of being victims of miscarriages of justice. In a biased justice system, the ultimate sentence can’t be applied fairly.

A turn for the worse

Only 17 states executed people in 2025, but the numbers of victims are rising. Amnesty International recorded a low of 483 verified executions in 2020, but by 2025, the figure had climbed to at least 2,707.

Rhetoric about tackling conflict, crime and insecurity is driving the increase. Tough-talking populist leaders tap into public outrage stoked by particularly vile crimes to use death sentences as a show of strength. The growing numbers signal a broader erosion of respect for human rights.

Civil society campaigns for abolition because the death penalty is an inherent affront to fundamental human rights, including the rights to life and to freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There’s also no evidence that it deters crime, and it carries a risk of miscarriages of justice that grows where the rule of law is weak. People from excluded groups may be in particular danger, as in the USA. Israel has made that targeting explicit, as Uganda did when its 2023 anti-LGBTQI+ law introduced the death sentence for what it calls ‘aggravated homosexuality’.

Iran isn’t alone in twisting the justice system to serve political ends. It’s among the eight of 10 states that carry out the highest numbers of executions – China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Yemen – that have closed civic space. The other two are Somalia, where civic space conditions are only a little better, and the USA, long the outlier but with rapidly deteriorating respect for civic freedoms under Trump.

Backward steps in Africa and Asia

Regression extends beyond Iran, Israel and the USA. In 2025, authorities in Japan, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates resumed executions after pauses of several years. Maldives has introduced a bill to end the moratorium on executions it has maintained since 1954, and changed the Drug Act last year to extend the death penalty to drug-trafficking offences. Algeria has also extended it to drug-related offences, while Kuwait has expanded its scope. Myanmar’s military junta, which has executed democracy campaigners, widened the range of capital offences ahead of its recent sham election.

Last year, the Democratic Republic of the Congo suspended the moratorium on executions it had maintained since 2003, citing insurgency in its east. Its broad definition of treason and the inadequacies of its justice system make it highly likely innocent people will be executed. Within months of the change, the authorities handed down over 130 death sentences, including against 25 soldiers convicted of ‘fleeing in the face of the enemy’ after a one-day trial.

Other African states seem set to follow suit. Last year, Chad set up a commission to investigate the possible restoration of the death penalty, abolished in 2020. Military-run Niger is reportedly reconsidering its moratorium. Neighbouring Burkina Faso’s military junta announced last December that it would reintroduce the death penalty, abolished in 2018, for espionage, high treason and terrorism. Given it has systematically cracked down on dissent through enforced disappearances, forced conscription and dissolution of political parties, it’s likely to use the death penalty against opponents.

Civil society pushing for progress

Sustained civil society advocacy has brought successes. The death penalty has been abolished in 113 countries, meaning only a minority retain it, and others have introduced moratoriums or reduced the number of offences it applies to. Zambia abolished the death penalty in 2022. Malaysia ended mandatory death sentences for a range of crimes the following year, and in 2025 it set up a committee to consider complete abolition. Pakistan ended the death penalty for drug crimes in 2023 and The Gambia abolished it for some offences in 2025. There has been progress even in authoritarian Vietnam, where parliament voted to repeal the death penalty for eight offences in 2025.

In repressive states, campaigners pay for their work. Singapore’s authorities have harassed and intimidated human rights lawyers representing people on death row, fined activists for holding vigils and vilified the Transformative Justice Collective, which campaigns for abolition, forcing it to suspend its website and social media channels. Political leaders accuse lawyers who support appeals against death sentences of abusing the process and frame opponents of the death penalty as soft on drug crime, deterring some lawyers from taking on cases.

The Transformative Justice Collective’s efforts were recently recognised at the Ninth World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where it and Iran Human Rights received the Documentation Award. This recognition of civil society’s work in difficult conditions made clear that ending the death penalty means breaking silences, exposing its brutality and telling the stories of injustice. Civil society will keep doing precisely that in the states that are still killing people in cold blood, and keep trying to hold the line in those that are considering taking a backward step.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org