At least 901 people were reportedly executed in Iran last year, including about 40 in a single week in December, according to the UN human rights chief.

“It is deeply worrying that we are once again seeing an increase in the number of people facing the death penalty in Iran compared to last year,” said Volker Türk. “It is high time for Iran to put a stop to this ever-increasing wave of executions.”

The total is the highest in nine years and represents a 6% increase from 2023, when 853 people were executed.

Most executions were for drug-related offenses, but dissidents and people linked to the 2022 protests were also executed, according to the United Nations. The number of women executed also increased.

Türk called on Iranian authorities to stop all further executions and impose a moratorium on the use of the death penalty with a view to ultimately abolishing it.

“The death penalty is incompatible with the fundamental right to life and increases the unacceptable risk of innocent people being executed. And to be clear, it can never be imposed for conduct protected by international human rights law,” he warned.

A spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office told reporters that the figures came from several organizations it considers reliable, including Iran’s Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Hengaw.

On Monday, Norway-based IHR said in a report that at least 31 women were executed in 2024 – the highest number since monitoring of the death penalty began 17 years ago.

Nineteen of them were sentenced to death for murder, according to the report. Among them was Leila Ghaemi, who, according to IHR, strangled her husband after she came home one day to find him and his friends raping their young daughter.

The other twelve women were convicted of drug offenses. Among them was Parvin Mousavi, who, according to IHR, was her family’s breadwinner and had received about €15 ($15.60) for the transport of medication, which was said to be 5 kg of morphine.

Activists say drug crimes do not meet the threshold of “most serious crimes” to which the death penalty must be limited under international law.

A separate report from Hengawa Kurdish human rights group said more than half of those executed last year were from ethnic minorities in Iran, including 183 Kurds.

The U.N. fact-finding mission on Iran said in August that ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by the country’s repression of dissent since 2022, when nationwide “Women, Life, Freedom” protests erupted in response to the death of a person in custody Government concerned Young Kurdish woman arrested by moral police because she was not wearing a “proper” hijab.

HRANA, meanwhile, reported that it documented the execution of five juvenile offenders. International law prohibits the use of the death penalty in all cases where the defendant was under 18 years of age at the time of the alleged crime.

According to human rights group Amnesty International, Iran accounted for 74% of all recorded executions worldwide in 2023.

These figures exclude China, where Amnesty says thousands of people are executed each year but where death penalty data has been kept secret.