At least 1,212 people were executed for drug-related offences last year, according to the latest analysis by Harm Reduction International (HRI) – a ‘catastrophic’ 97 per cent increase on 2024’s total of 615 and the highest number since monitoring began two decades ago. More than 950 of the executions were carried out in Iran, an average of almost three per day.
Punitive drug control is now a ‘primary driver’ of the death penalty worldwide, says The death penalty for drug offences: global overview 2025, with drug-related executions now accounting for almost half of all confirmed worldwide executions. However, levels of state secrecy in countries like China and North Korea mean the true scale is likely ‘far greater’, the agency stresses.
Almost 2,500 people across 22 countries are currently on death row for drug offences, the report states, with many facing ‘imminent’ execution. The number of countries retaining the death penalty for drug offences now stands at 36, its highest level, after Algeria and the Maldives amended their laws to introduce it.
‘The application of the death penalty for drug offences frequently targets the most vulnerable members of society,’ the document says, with the majority occupying ‘peripheral roles’ in the drug trade. Among those executed last year, more than 270 were foreign nationals and almost 340 were from ethnic minorities. At least 23 were women, many of whom were arrested either as couriers or accomplices to their partners.
‘Iran’s intensified war on drugs has disproportionately impacted marginalised groups, including ethnic minorities, people from disadvantaged backgrounds and foreign nationals,’ the report states, with many enduring trials ‘riddled with severe rights violations.’ Most drug-related executions in Iran are not officially announced, it says, with many carried out in secret.
‘Iran’s Islamic Penal Code allows elm-e-qazi (knowledge of the judge) as an admissible basis for establishing guilt in the absence of a confession or witness testimonies, based on other available evidence – including circumstantial evidence,’ the report continues. Human rights organisations have reported instances where this has been ‘arbitrarily applied’, such as when three men were executed on 9 September last year ‘in a joint case where no drugs or other evidence were found’. Other documented human rights violations include ‘systematic’ denial of effective legal counsel and confessions extracted through torture.
While the world had been generally trending towards abolition, last year saw ‘significant setbacks’, says HRI. ‘The 2025 spike was driven largely by a small group of countries that have intensified their punitive measures’ while ‘for the first time in over a decade, two countries – Algeria and the Maldives – introduced the death penalty for certain drug offences.’
‘The year 2025 was an exceptionally brutal one for global drug control,’ said HRI’s acting executive director Catherine Cook. ‘We are witnessing a sharp escalation in the use of the death penalty by a small but resolute group of countries. The international community’s long-standing failure to hold executing states accountable has moved beyond negligence and now borders complicity. By maintaining “business as usual” – and in the case of the UNODC, continuing to fund enforcement in countries like Iran – global institutions are effectively subsidising a record-breaking surge in state-sanctioned killing.’
The death penalty for drug offences: global overview 2025 available here