The “No to Execution, Yes to Free Life” campaign released a statement calling for international action against the increasingly ongoing execution campaign by the Iranian regime.
The statement on Tuesday reads as follows:
“The “No to Execution, Yes to Free Life” campaign raises its voice in outrage and deep sorrow against the ongoing wave of executions carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran — a wave that continues to claim the lives of political prisoners, protesters, members of ethnic and religious minorities, and individuals who have done nothing more than stand up for their fundamental human rights.
Iran has consistently ranked among the world’s leading executioners. Hundreds of people are put to death every year, many of them following trials that fall far short of any international standard of justice — without access to legal representation, under confessions obtained through torture, and with no right to a fair and transparent judicial process. The executions of protesters arrested during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising shocked the world. Yet the killings have not stopped. They have only intensified.
Behind every execution is a human being — a daughter, a son, a mother, a father. Behind every execution is a story silenced forever by the state.
War as cover: How Iran uses armed conflict to accelerate its killing machine
The “No to Execution, Yes to Free Life” campaign condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the deliberate and systematic use of war and regional armed conflict by the Islamic Republic of Iran as a shield behind which it escalates its domestic execution campaign — silencing dissent, terrorizing its own people, and exploiting the world’s distracted gaze.
This is not a coincidence, this is strategy
History has shown, and recent events confirm, that every time Iran’s government intensifies its military engagement — whether through direct conflict, proxy warfare, or regional escalation — the number of executions rises sharply. While international attention turns to the battlefield, the gallows work overtime. Political prisoners, labor activists, journalists, members of Kurdish, Baluch, and Arab minorities, and young people who dared to protest are rushed to their deaths in silence, far from the cameras of the world.
The regime exploits the fog of war to eliminate its opponents under the cover of “national security,” “espionage,” and “enmity against God” — charges that are nothing more than weapons of political repression dressed in legal language.
We are witnessing a pattern that must be named for what it is: the use of war as an instrument of internal repression. When missiles are launched abroad, prison gates close tighter at home. When the world debates geopolitics, Iran’s death rows are emptied — not through pardons, but through executions carried out in the early hours before dawn.
We call upon the international community to act:
• The United Nations Security Council and Human Rights Council must explicitly link any discussion of Iran’s regional military conduct to its escalating domestic use of the death penalty. These are not separate issues — they are two faces of the same authoritarian violence.
• Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and all global civil society organizations must redouble their monitoring efforts precisely during periods of regional conflict, when executions are most likely to surge and least likely to be reported.
• Governments engaged in diplomatic negotiations with Iran must place the immediate suspension of executions on the table as a binding condition, not an afterthought.
• International media must resist the regime’s tactic of distraction. Covering the war without covering the executions is covering only half the truth.
• The International Criminal Court and relevant UN Special Rapporteurs must investigate whether the deliberate acceleration of executions during wartime constitutes a crime against humanity under international law.
Every war has victims on the front lines. In Iran, there are also victims behind prison walls — killed not by enemy fire, but by their own government, precisely because the world is looking elsewhere.
War does not justify execution. Conflict does not silence conscience. No government may kill its people in the shadow of a war it chose to wage.
Join us. Speak out. Save lives.”
Campaign: “No to Execution, Yes to Free Life”
Contact: Life.not.execution@gmail.com
Instagram: @life_not_execution | X: @notexecution
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