IRAN IS BECOMING A PRISON
Meanwhile, repression is accelerating under cover of war. Legislation ostensibly aimed at espionage and collaboration with the enemy, introduced late last year, has turned crimes that once carried jail terms into capital offences.
The number of people executed hasn’t necessarily increased (last year saw the highest number killed since 1989, averaging four to five executions per day), but the proportion of political prisoners among them has.
I spoke about this with Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, a professor of neuroscience who also founded a Norway-based nonprofit called Iran Human Rights, to track Iran’s use of the death penalty. So far this year, he said, the regime has executed 28 political prisoners, up from two in 2025. Of the 26 who were protesters, at least two have been hanged in public at the scene of their alleged crime. With another 70 protesters on death row in the city of Isfahan’s main prison alone, Amiry-Moghaddam is very concerned that this officially sanctioned carnage will grow.
Now the Basij, a militia of ideologically driven thugs that the IRGC uses to put down protests, has been given a new head who led previous crackdowns and has been tasked with turning the group into an intelligence network.
A law “to curb foreign influence” is wending its way through the Iranian Majlis, or parliament. This will criminalise any communication with media from countries considered hostile to the Islamic Republic, while interviews with all other foreign media would require prior permission from the intelligence ministry. Long a police state, Iran is becoming a prison.
This suits the IRGC and other hardliners. If left to face their own people with no state of war to cow them into quiescence, this regime simply would not be able to answer their complaints. It is too invested in the corrupt economic system it has developed and its officials lack the skills needed for effective reform and economic management.
