The Iranian Human Rights Organization announced that the Iranian authorities executed over one hundred people during the month of July. (File photo: Reuters)

Struan Stevenson
Struan Stevenson is president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014)

In Iran, political prisoners are sentenced to hang with some frequency, usually on the basis of vague, religious charges like “enmity against God” or “insulting the sacred.”

Repressive, theocratic regime
Executions speak to the repressive nature of the theocratic regime, which has only grown worse in the era of Rouhani, when the government is fractured between two factions, neither of which represents reform.

 Maryam Rajavi, the president of the leading coalition of Iranian dissidents, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, responded to the new death penalty figures by saying, “Beset by crises and fearing popular uprisings, Iran’s ruling theocracy has found no other way out but to escalate repression especially by mass and arbitrary executions.”