Iran’s repressive regime executed more than 900 people in 2024 and handed down “scores
of death sentences for religious-based charges,” according to a March report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
Research by the U.K.-based nonprofit Article 18 found that Iranian courts sentenced 96 Christians to a combined 263 years in prison in 2024. These troubling statistics represent a 38% increase in average sentence length and a sixfold increase in cumulative sentencing compared to 2023. Several Christians received particularly severe sentences of 10 years or more, according to the Article 18 report published in January.
In addition to increased judicial repression of religion, Iran also stepped up its street-level enforcement of morality laws, mainly targeting women and girls seen as violating the country’s strict religious regulations on dress.
“Morality police violently arrested and assaulted women not in compliance with these regulations,” USCIRF said in its March report, adding that the morality police “also penalized businesses that allowed patronage by women not wearing the hijab.”
One of the world’s few theocracies, the Iranian system is built on extreme devotion to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
After the overthrow of the secular but authoritarian monarchy in 1979, Iran swung hard toward Islamist extremism and has continued that path ever since, with a growing security apparatus designed to suppress religious and political dissent in every corner of society.
The U.S. Department of State has designated Iran as a Country of Particular Concern every year since the designations were created in 1999. The designation, created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, denotes countries that engage in or tolerate particularly severe violations of religious freedom. IRFA goes on to define “particularly severe” as systematic, ongoing, egregious violations such as torture, prolonged detention without charges, forced disappearances, and the “flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, or the security of persons.”
In February, the U.S. deported a small group of Iranian converts to Christianity, sending them to Panama where their fate is uncertain. While the U.S. does have protections in place for those seeking asylum based on persecution in their home country, reports suggest that the asylum process was not followed in this case. Conversion to Christianity is punishable by death in Iran.
Iran’s constitution, finalized soon after the 1979 revolution, is a religious manifesto that quotes the Quran extensively and mandates the military fulfill “the ideological mission of jihad in Allah’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of Allah’s law throughout the world.”
For religious minorities in Iran, there is no escape from the extremist policies of a government fueled by an extremist interpretation of Shia Islam that leaves no room even for Sunni Islam, much less religious minorities like Christianity. — International Christian Concern
