Iran is set to execute its first female protester and her husband as part of the nation’s crackdown on those who participated in the January protests.
The country has already hanged seven people in connection with the protests, which were ruthlessly stamped out in a crackdown that left thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested.
Four more people were sentenced to de@th today, April 14, by a Tehran Revolutionary Court presided over by the notorious judge Imam Afshari.
They were identified as Bita Hemmati and her husband, Mohammadreza Majidi-Asl, along with two other men, Behrouz Zamaninejad and Kourosh Zamaninejad, who lived in the same Tehran building as the married couple.
Hemmati is believed to be the first woman to be sentenced to de@th over the protests.
The four were convicted of carrying out actions on behalf of the United States, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said in separate statements.
They had been accused of throwing concrete blocks from a residential building onto security forces in the capital.
The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said it also believed that Hemmati was the woman who appeared in a video broadcast on state television in January, being personallinterrogated by judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei.
The recording and broadcasting of forced confessions from defendants in an opaque process… constitutes a blatant violation of the defendant’s rights,’ it said.
Rights groups accuse the Islamic Republic of using the de@th penalty as a tool of repression to instil fear in society, and fear it will ramp up capital punishment in the wake of the war against Israel and the United States.
Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the De@th Penalty (ECPM) said on Monday in their joint annual report on the death penalty in Iran that at least 1,639 people have been executed in 2025, including 48 women.
Of these, 21 women were executed for the murd£r of their husbands or fiancés, the report said. Rights groups have said women executed for killing spouses or relatives were often in abusive relationships.
The number of executions represented an increase of 68 per cent on the 975 people Iranian authorities put to death in 2024.
The figure amounted to an average of more than four executions per day.
The report said the number of executions was by far the highest since IHR began tracking it in 2008, and was the most reported since 1989, in the earlier years of the Islamic revolution.