Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
European Tech Sovereignty
16JUL

Iran hangs a 15th uprising protester

3 min read
09:32UTC

Abbas Akbari Feyzabadi was hanged in Isfahan on Monday for taking part in January's protests, the 15th execution tied to the uprising. His sentence was carried out before his family was told.

TechnologyDeveloping
Key takeaway

Iran's execution tempo over the January protests continues unbroken while its diplomats negotiate abroad.

Abbas Akbari Feyzabadi was executed on Monday 25 May in Isfahan province on a charge of moharebeh, enmity against God, for taking part in the January 2026 protests, according to i24 News and the Oslo-based monitor Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) 1. Iranian authorities accused Akbari Feyzabadi of opening fire on security forces and attacking government buildings, and carried out his Supreme Court-upheld sentence before notifying his family.

He was the 15th person put to death over the January uprising, the wave of protests that swept Iran early in the year and met a lethal state response. His case is distinct from that of Mojtaba Kian, executed a day earlier on espionage charges . The two hangings on consecutive days mark different tracks of the same crackdown: one framed as wartime espionage, the other as armed rebellion.

For the reader: moharebeh is a capital charge under Iranian law for waging war against the state, applied here to protest activity that the authorities say turned violent. The pre-notification execution, carrying out the sentence before telling the family, is a pattern rights monitors have documented repeatedly through the war.

The rights record runs in parallel to the diplomacy, not behind it. Amnesty International's 2026 execution register passed 200 earlier this month , and Akbari Feyzabadi's death adds to a count that has not slowed while negotiators talk. The table in Beijing and the gallows in Isfahan ran on the same Monday, and only one of them produced a document.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran executed Abbas Akbari Feyzabadi in Isfahan province on 25 May. He was the 15th person put to death for taking part in the January 2026 protests, which erupted after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the US-Israeli strikes that started the war. He was charged with 'enmity against God', a capital offence under Iran's Islamic Penal Code, based on accusations that he fired on security forces and attacked government buildings. Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) in Oslo documented the execution and confirmed the family received no prior notification. The executions for protest activity continue even as Iranian officials hold diplomatic talks aimed at ending the war, a pattern Iran has followed in previous conflicts and protest crackdowns.

What could happen next?
  • Consequence

    The 15-execution pace for January-uprising activity means European governments conditioning any Iran sanctions relief on human-rights improvements face a rising evidentiary record that makes conditionality politically harder to waive.

  • Risk

    If the pace of executions accelerates beyond 15 before any MOU is signed, parliamentary scrutiny in EU member states may add human-rights conditions to any sanctions-waiver instrument that requires European legal frameworks to implement.

First Reported In

Update #107 · Two markets, two prices on one Iran deal

i24 News· 25 May 2026
Read original
Different Perspectives
Trump administration
Trump administration
Washington defends the MATCH Act as closing a loophole that lets ASML's DUV tools reach Chinese fabs indirectly, dismissing the Dutch Cabinet's June complaint of being treated with disregard. Officials expect the bill's progress through Congress to keep the DUV cross-subsidy question live regardless of ASML's Q2 numbers.
Bruegel
Bruegel
Brussels-based economists argue this week's deliverables, specialist fab aid and a digital euro that restricts no US firm, prove Europe's sovereignty agenda advances only where it meets no American resistance. They expect the leading-edge fabrication gap and dependence on US frontier AI models to persist absent a policy that directly confronts a named US interest.
German federal government
German federal government
Berlin welcomes the €659m tranche funding jobs across North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hesse and Bavaria, on top of the ESMC Dresden fab already under construction on TSMC-shipped tooling. Officials treat power and analogue capacity as the achievable near-term win while Dresden remains Germany's only bet on leading-edge logic.
House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
The committee's 7 July report found the UK has "no coherent strategic framework" for sovereign technology and warns it "risks being cut off at whim", citing the June order that barred foreign access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as the trigger case. It expects no domestic hyperscaler or foundry response before the gap widens further.
European Commission
European Commission
The Commission cleared €659m in German state aid on 14 July, taking cumulative Chips Act support to roughly €14.2bn, and let the digital-euro mandate reach trilogue after ECON's floor-vote shortcut was overturned. Brussels presents both as sovereignty delivered, without addressing that neither funds leading-edge logic fabrication.
ASML
ASML
ASML raised FY2026 guidance to €43-45bn on 15 July and, for the first time since Q1, dropped the export-control hedge from its release even with the MATCH Act live in Congress. Fouquet frames the order book, 86 systems against 67 in Q1, as strong enough to outrun the DUV dispute rather than evidence it has cooled.