English translation of the Persian essay originally published on 11 October 2026.
18 Mehr is marked as a day of opposition to the death penalty. This year, however, differs from previous years for two reasons. First, the United States is reportedly preparing to broadcast an execution by firing squad live for the first time in fifty years. Second, extensive executions in Iran have helped drive the global execution rate to its highest level in years. But how did execution become part of everyday life for Iranians? This essay takes a historical look at how qisas—retribution in kind—entered and became established in Iran’s judicial system.
A turning point in the meaning of capital punishment
In the history of Iran’s 1979 revolution, the spring of 1981 marks a dividing line between revolutionary pluralism and the consolidation of a state that permitted only one voice. At the centre of that rupture stood a judicial text of 218 articles: the Qisas Bill. It was drafted by the Supreme Judicial Council, then led by figures including Mohammad Beheshti and Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardabili. It represented far more than a change in legislation. It fundamentally altered Iran’s criminal justice system, particularly the philosophy, scope and criteria of capital punishment.
Since the Constitutional Revolution, Iran’s modern legal system had moved towards limiting death sentences and defining punishment within the framework of modern criminology. The bill abruptly redirected that system towards traditional Islamic jurisprudence. Opposition to this expanded understanding of capital punishment culminated on 15 June 1981, when Ruhollah Khomeini delivered a fierce speech, declared its opponents apostates, and helped usher in an unprecedented wave of political executions.
The newspaper battle over death and corporal punishment
Before the confrontation reached the streets, newspapers became a battleground for lawyers, clerics and political movements debating the legal legitimacy of execution and corporal punishment.
- Enghelab-e Eslami: This newspaper became a major platform for defenders of modern legal principles. On 19 April 1981, it published a historic statement by 112 law professors and judges. They argued that extending capital punishment across a broad range of personal and family disputes, on the basis of traditional jurisprudence and without scientific methods of establishing guilt, would sharply increase crime and executions while undermining legal security.
- Mizan: Associated with Mehdi Bazargan and the Freedom Movement, Mizan criticised the bill from a religious but reformist perspective. Its writers warned that introducing execution and amputation without first creating conditions for social justice and reducing poverty would fail to eliminate crime and present a harsh, frightening image of Islam and revolutionary society.
- Jomhouri-ye Eslami: Supporters of the bill argued that opposition to punishments derived from Islamic jurisprudence, including execution through qisas, amounted to opposition to explicit Quranic provisions. In interviews, Beheshti accused critics of adopting Western and humanist assumptions and disregarding the value of a Muslim’s life and the victim’s family’s claim to retribution.
The National Front’s protest and the lawyers’ objections
In early June 1981, the National Front of Iran issued a statement describing the bill as a means of trampling on the Iranian people’s human dignity. It called for a demonstration on 15 June. Behind that political statement lay substantial legal objections raised by prominent jurists, including Nasser Katouzian and Abdolkarim Lahidji, leading figures in the Iranian Association of Jurists.
Their concerns about the proposed system of capital punishment included the following:
Turning execution into a private entitlement
Under the modern legal model described by the critics, execution was the most severe public punishment, pursued through the public prosecutor and subject to strict state rules. The bill recast it as a private, family entitlement belonging to the victim’s heirs. A murdered person’s relatives could demand execution or agree to spare the offender in exchange for financial compensation, known as diya. The lawyers saw this as the commodification of human life and a return to tribal forms of justice.
Gender discrimination in access to retribution
Under Article 6 of the proposed bill, if a man killed a woman, her family would have to pay half a man’s full diya before the man could be executed in retribution. This payment, sometimes described as the difference in blood money, effectively assigned a woman’s life half the value of a man’s. A poor family unable to raise the money could therefore be prevented from obtaining qisas for their murdered relative. The provision exposed a stark inequality within the proposed system.
Traditional methods of proving a capital offence
The bill relied on confession, testimony from two apparently upright men, and qasameh—an oath procedure involving fifty members of the claimant’s family—to establish intentional killing. Critics contrasted these methods with scientific investigation, criminology and forensic evidence. They warned that taking a person’s life on the basis of oaths or traditional testimony increased the risk of judicial error and the execution of innocent people.
When opposing a bill became apostasy
On the morning of 15 June 1981, as protesters headed towards Tehran’s Ferdowsi Square, national radio broadcast Khomeini’s speech live from Jamaran. Opposition to a bill concerning capital punishment was itself transformed into a basis for threatening opponents with death and removing them from political life.
Khomeini treated legal objections to religiously prescribed punishments as a declaration of war against God and a departure from Islam. Referring to the National Front’s description of the bill as inhuman, he declared the organisation apostate and insisted that qisas was an explicit Quranic command.
In traditional jurisprudence, apostasy can carry the death penalty. The implication of his words was therefore to expose members and supporters of a political movement to the threat of death. In the same speech he attacked Mohammad Mossadegh, claiming that he had not been a Muslim.
After the speech, pro-Khomeini forces violently suppressed the peaceful demonstration in Ferdowsi Square. It marked the beginning of a bloody turn in the revolution’s history. Days later, with the parliamentary removal of President Abolhassan Banisadr on 21 June, the machinery of political execution accelerated dramatically. Thousands of political opponents and critics were sent before firing squads during the summer of 1981.
Khomeini also placed Bazargan and the Freedom Movement under intense pressure to distance themselves from the National Front. He called on those who considered themselves Muslims to make their position clear and publicly reject the statement condemning qisas, thereby separating themselves from the people he had labelled apostates.
The authorities expected Bazargan to denounce his former allies in order to escape the same accusation. He refused to issue such a denunciation. Despite severe security pressure, he maintained a moderate, ethical position. The price was the Freedom Movement’s lasting isolation and the closure of Mizan.
What happened to the lawyers?
- Mohammad-Taqi Damghani: An experienced lawyer, executive member of the jurists’ association and a founder of the lawyers’ union, Damghani was arrested after the events of June 1981. A Revolutionary Court convicted him over his role in drafting, printing and distributing the statement opposing the Qisas Bill. He spent the years 1981–1988 in prison, and his licence to practise law was permanently revoked.
- Abdolkarim Lahidji: The association’s spokesperson and a vice-president of the Iranian organisation defending freedom and human rights faced a Revolutionary Court arrest warrant in late June 1981. After months in hiding, he left Iran clandestinely in early 1982. He settled in France and later served as president and vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights, continuing to document human rights violations and executions in Iran.
- Hedayatollah Matin-Daftari: A lawyer, grandson of Mossadegh and a founder of the jurists’ association, Matin-Daftari was targeted after openly opposing the bill and executions. His legal and political offices were ransacked. Following months in hiding, he escaped Iran and continued his legal work in exile.
- Nasser Katouzian: The distinguished law professor, who drafted the statement signed by 112 professors and judges, was not arrested. He was, however, expelled from the University of Tehran and barred from teaching during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the 1980s, he worked in enforced isolation on legal reference books before eventually being allowed to teach again.
- Yahya Sadegh-Vaziri, Sarem al-Din Sadegh-Vaziri and Nour-Ali Tabandeh: These jurists and former judges, who sat on the association’s central council, faced severe security pressure. In autumn 1981, state forces took control of the Bar Association, its board was suspended, and many lawyers were prohibited from travelling or practising.
Repression, lengthy imprisonment, exile and the destruction of professional independence followed the lawyers’ opposition to the bill. Established in 1977 with more than 120 prominent lawyers, judges and jurists, the association had organised serious professional resistance to the restructuring of capital and corporal punishment on religious grounds. It paid heavily for that resistance. The suppression weakened independent advocacy and removed defenders of fair trial standards from cases in which lives were at stake, clearing the way for hudud and qisas provisions to become entrenched in criminal courts.
The long-term consequences
The crisis surrounding the bill can be understood through three structural changes.
- The institutionalisation of legal violence: Provisions that later formed the backbone of the Islamic Penal Code changed the judicial system. While many countries were moving towards limiting capital punishment, Iran extended it into a broad range of personal, family and ideological relationships.
- Religious denunciation as a political weapon: The confrontation showed how a government could turn a legal debate into a test of religious loyalty, call political critics apostates, and create conditions conducive to the mass executions of the 1980s.
- The weakening of fair trial protections: Giving traditional evidentiary procedures, including qasameh, precedence over scientific investigation and forensic evidence created enduring problems for fair trial standards in capital cases.
A law that remained provisional for decades
One historical detail deserves attention. Because of its profound legal difficulties and widespread opposition, the Qisas Bill did not pass through the ordinary parliamentary process as a permanent law. In 1982, it went directly to the judicial commission and was approved for a five-year experimental period. Provisional arrangements were subsequently renewed for more than three decades.
Those repeated extensions reflected unresolved tensions in a legal framework that placed human life at stake. The events of June 1981 tell the story of a bill bound up with one of the bloodiest political purges and waves of execution in modern Iranian history—and with the consolidation of political monopoly in the Islamic Republic.
Further material on the jurists’ statements can be found at Kadivar’s website and in the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center’s archive.