In anticipation of the recent World Day Against the Death Penalty, the Iranian human rights activists, namely Iran Human Rights Monitor issued a statement regarding a campaign launched by Iranian resistance movement leader Maryam Rajavi, to stop execution in Iran.

More than 1,500 lawmakers, scholars, current and former officials, including 455 lawmakers, 34 former presidents and prime ministers, 59 former ministers and UN ambassadors, 102 international judges and legal scholars, 109 renowned human rights experts and 46 Nobel Laureates, representing 78 countries signed the petition in support of the call while highlighting an ongoing surge of executions in the Islamic Republic, which has reinforced its status as the country with the world’s highest rate of executions per capita. The statement underscores the need for global action to halt this trend and reiterates the opposition’s commitment to abolishing capital punishment in Iran altogether.

I, as a former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, was of the signatories of that letter. Many of those same figures have previously signed statements of support for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its leader Maryam Rajavi, who spearheaded a campaign to say “No to Executions” in July and whose plan for Iran’s future made clear more than 20 years ago that a transition to democratic governance would bring with it a formal disavowal of the death penalty and a corresponding reform of the current regime’s arbitrary and medieval approach to criminal justice.

As our statement affirms, these features of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship have only become more entrenched in recent years, especially as it has faced a rising tide of activism from a network of Resistance Units affiliated with the coalition’s leading constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran. This has contributed to a situation in which Iran accounted for 74 percent of all the world’s executions in 2023. That statistic was confirmed by Amnesty International, which has also repeatedly noted that the clerical regime is using capital punishment as part of an effort to intimidate the public into compliance.

To the great credit of the Iranian people, that strategy has evidently failed so far, with anti-government sentiment being as prevalent as ever among Iranian social media users while regime officials continue to raise alarms over the prospect of large-scale unrest breaking out again, more than two years after the nationwide uprising that was sparked by the morality police killing of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman who was apprehended in Tehran after it was decided that she was wearing her mandatory hijab too loosely.

After it began in September 2022, that uprising was widely recognized as the greatest challenge to the mullahs’ regime since its inception in 1979. The key slogans of the uprising had previously been popularized by the NCRI and the PMOI-affiliated Resistance Units.

Of course, Tehran’s awareness of that support only amplifies the threat of politically-motivated executions, as well as the threat of executions in all categories being directed toward political ends.

Among the approximately 267 executions carried since the new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian took office, one was Reza Resaei. He was the tenth individual known to have been put to death over charges of “enmity against God” or “spreading corruption on Earth” which stemmed from participation in that protest movement.

Tehran’s blatant violation of international law includes executions, every year, of persons who were under the age of 18 at the time of their alleged offenses. Iranian officials, including the regime’s own so-called human rights monitor, have explicitly argued that international proscriptions on such killings do not apply to the Islamic Republic because they conflict with its supposed, pre-existing religious and cultural traditions. But broad, longstanding activist trends inside Iran make it absolutely clear that the Iranian people do not share the regime’s outlook in this or practically any other regard.

The ongoing surge of executions makes it especially urgent for the leaders of democratic nations to support the Iranian people in their efforts to abolish the death penalty, but that goes hand-in-hand with efforts to establish a framework for free and fair elections, to separate religion from the state, and to establish legal protections for women and minorities.

The violent suppression of dissent is the only thing holding Iranians back from attaining those goals, and sadly, that suppression is enabled by the wider world’s relative inattention to human rights abuses inside the Islamic Republic, including its ongoing surge of executions. That inattention might look worse by the current situation of multinational conflict in the broader Middle East, but it is vital to keep in mind that by helping Iranians to solve the problems of misuse and excessive application of the death penalty, the international community will also be helping to set in motion the process of regime change which will ultimately remove the existing regime’s malign influence and support for the terrorist groups that are driving the conflict and threatening the world at large.