Hengaw, the Norway-based Kurdish human rights organisation that has been the main independent monitor of Iranian executions through this war, counted at least 67 executions in Iran during July, of which Iranian authorities or judiciary media acknowledged eight, or 12%1. Nine of the dead were political prisoners or prisoners of conscience, and seven were put to death in secret with no advance notice to their families; a single case can sit in both counts2.
The headline number fell. July's total is down about 39% from June's 109, and on Hengaw's own year-on-year comparison roughly 30% below its July 2025 count3. What changed was not the volume but the silence around it, which means a family's first notice of a capital sentence is now usually the instruction to collect a body. That silence has consequences beyond grief: the appeals, clemency petitions and international campaigns that have occasionally saved Iranian prisoners cannot begin against a sentence nobody has published, as the secret Isfahan hanging on this record already showed.
Among those named by Hengaw is Meysam Irandegani, executed at 18 over an offence dating from his childhood4. Iran acceded to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1994 with a reservation broad enough to preserve its own penal code, and executions for crimes committed before 18 have continued through two decades of UN condemnation.
One caution on the data. Hengaw verifies what it can from outside the country, so its figure is a floor rather than a total, and a war that has cut power and communications across several provinces makes verification harder. Part of the fall may measure the monitoring rather than the killing.
