A View From Inside Iran: Silencing a Generation — Voices Lost to the Gallows

“Don’t tell Mom.”

It is a sentence that has echoed through Iran’s prisons for decades. A sentence carried through monitored phone lines in the final minutes granted to the political prisoners before execution.

It’s a closing plea made just before the state carries out a sentence from which there is no appeal in practice, regardless of what the law suggests in theory.

Political prisoners are typically permitted one final phone call. The call is brief and the tone measured. A father or a sibling answers. There is no explicit reference to what awaits. The word execution is rarely spoken aloud. Surveillance renders such candor both futile and dangerous.

Instead, there is a restraint.

“Dad … please don’t tell Mom.”

He once imagined a different future. He is a teenager with dreams. Employment. Stability. The ordinary dignity of contributing to his household. A simple life with shared meals, familiar arguments, the slow accumulation of years.

He did not anticipate becoming an example.

In the final hours, time takes on a different texture. Memory becomes intrusive. Childhood surfaces with disorienting clarity. The mind hangs between improbable hope and quiet comprehension. There may be a reprieve. Perhaps international pressure will intervene. Perhaps the sentence will be suspended. Hope flickers irrationally. But the machinery of execution is efficient. The last image is not of ideology. Not of slogans. It is of home.

And then, silence.

Executions function not only as punishment, but as communication. A message sent through prison walls into society: dissent has consequences. Protest has a cost. Silence is safer.

Within Iran’s Revolutionary Courts, outcomes in political cases are determined long before the hearing begins. Access to a lawyer is restricted. Trials may last minutes; in some cases, there are no trials. Charges such as “enmity against God” or “corruption on earth” are applied, enabling capital punishment under a broadly interpreted definition of dissent.

By the time the final call is made, the legal process has typically run its course.

What follows is administrative efficiency.

Hours later, families are notified. The burial conditions are controlled and restricted. Public mourning is not permitted. Grief itself becomes regulated.

The executions of political prisoners in Iran emerge from a judicial architecture that has long blurred the boundary between adjudication and enforcement.

Political cases are typically adjudicated in Revolutionary Courts, institutions established in the aftermath of the 1979 coup d’état to address actions perceived as threats to the state. Over time, their jurisdiction has significantly expanded. Proceedings are conducted behind closed doors. Defendants in national security cases, as defined by the regime, may not be allowed to consult their preferred attorney during the investigative stage, which is a crucial time when coerced confessions are frequently obtained.

Claims of forced confessions, brief trials, and a lack of evidentiary transparency have all been documented by human rights organizations on numerous occasions. The way charges like “enmity against God” (moharebeh) and “corruption on earth” (efsad fel-arz) are phrased leaves room for interpretation. These offenses are punishable by death under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code.

In politically sensitive cases, appeals are reviewed in minutes and without public scrutiny. The interval between sentencing and execution is usually brief, especially during nationwide protests.

The outcome is a system in which capital punishment transcends its role as a criminal penalty and instead operates as a deliberate instrument of state control and intimidation.

The right to a fair and public hearing, access to independent legal counsel, and the exclusion of evidence obtained under duress are guaranteed under international legal standards, notably those set out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a member. International Law limits the use of capital punishment, where it has not been abolished, to the most serious crimes, understood to involve deliberate killing. Significant concerns arise regarding proportionality and due process when the death penalty is applied in cases related to protests. In such conditions, the legitimacy of the sentence itself is called into question, and fundamental legal protections are undermined.

Executions in this context serve a dual function: they eliminate the individual and communicate a warning to the broader public. Particularly in the aftermath of protest movements, they operate as instruments of deterrence, reinforcing the cost of dissent.

This is not merely a domestic judicial matter; it is a question of whether procedural form can substitute for substantive justice and whether the language of law can obscure the absence of its protections.

The cases differ in detail, but the structural concerns remain consistent: restricted legal representation, opaque trials, and the rapid advancement of capital sentences.

Time, in such cases, is measured not in months but in days, sometimes hours.

The international community has mechanisms at its disposal. Governments engaged in diplomatic relations with Tehran possess channels through which urgent appeals have been raised, yet these efforts have too often failed to elicit meaning response. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran has repeatedly called for transparency and adherence to international fair trial standards, but such appeals lack effective means to hold authorities inside Iran accountable.

Public pressure matters. Diplomatic engagement matters. Clear and coordinated messaging matters. Silence, too, carries consequences.

In the context of war and ceasefire, the Islamic Republic of Iran has intensified its repressive measures, imprisoning and executing young individuals for the simple act of sharing images and videos with international media. The Internet blackout has severely restricted access to information about detainees and ordinary Iranians.

As the United States and Islamic Republic of Iran prepare to engage in more high-stakes talks in Islamabad, aimed at stabilizing a fragile ceasefire following weeks of conflict, concerns are intensifying that those at risk of execution and ordinary Iranians may face heightened risk under an increasingly vengeful policy of the regime.

For Iranians, the future remains uncertain and unsettling. Rather than offering reassurance, these negotiations are met with anxiety and distrust, as many fear that diplomatic engagement may come at the cost of further repression at home.

Amid pervasive fear and danger, the fate of millions of Iranians remains unknown.

The men and women awaiting execution today are not abstractions. They are sons and daughters who once ended a phone call with the same plea:

“Don’t tell Mom.”

The question now is not only what will happen inside prison walls, but also what will happen outside of them — in foreign ministries, in multilateral institutions, in the public conscience. Because once the sentence is carried out, there is no correction. What Iranians might face now is the aftermath of an unfinished war.