In clinical practice, you quickly learn to distinguish between a symptom and the underlying disease. When a patient arrives with a raging fever, you do not cure the infection by attempting to shatter the thermometer. Yet in the dark, transactional logic of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the state continues to treat the visible expressions of its own institutional failure with the most lethal intervention at its disposal: the gallows. The recent executions of Hassan Dioband, Hamid Kazemi, and Reza Zanganeh, condemned for alleged armed unrest stemming from demonstrations earlier this year, are not acts of justice. They are the deliberate, calibrated application of state violence designed to shock an exhausted populace into compliance.
From a procedural standpoint, the evidentiary foundation of these capital cases lacks even the most basic diagnostic rigor. Human rights observers and legal advocates have documented for decades how Iran’s Revolutionary Courts operate on a standard of proof that would be instantly disqualified in any credible evidentiary review. Confessions obtained under conditions that amount to psychological and physical torture are routinely admitted into the record as decisive proof. Independent legal representation is systematically denied or restricted to state-approved counsel during the most critical phases of interrogation. To treat these proceedings as legitimate judicial determinations is akin to accepting a medical diagnosis rendered without baseline vitals, lab work, or imaging, driven entirely by an outcome preordained by the examining authority.
When we examine the broader social ecosystem, capital punishment functions as an acute public health crisis orchestrated from the top down. The trauma of state execution does not terminate with the physical cessation of cardiac and neural activity on the scaffold. It radiates outward in concentric circles, beginning with the immediate family, permeating neighborhood networks, and finally settling into the collective psyche of the entire nation. Sustained living under the threat of arbitrary execution induces a pervasive state of hypervigilance and civic depression. Chronic terror alters human behavior, stifles normal social cooperation, and fractures the social fabric required for a community to thrive. It is violence deployed as a prophylactic against democratic expression.
The timing and classification of these executions are also intensely telling. Labeling street protesters as perpetrators of armed unrest allows the regime to obscure the underlying drivers of the demonstrations. People do not risk their lives on the pavement of Iranian cities out of an abstract affinity for chaos. They pour into the avenues because the structural conditions of daily life have become untenable. From severe economic mismanagement and runaway inflation to systemic corruption and the severe rationing of basic civil liberties, the stressors on ordinary Iranians have reached toxic levels. The regime's reflex to treat economic and political desperation as a malignant military threat reveals an administration utterly incapable of self-correction.
Authoritarian survival, viewed through an institutional lens, relies on maintaining the high cost of defiance while driving the perceived cost of compliance down, even if that compliance involves slow civic death. In the short term, spectacles of extreme violence can depress the mobilization curve; fear is, after all, a potent acute depressant. But history and epidemiology alike suggest that suppressive measures that fail to address the etiologic agent will ultimately fail. The underlying drivers of popular fury remain unaddressed, simmering beneath the surface, waiting for the next catalyst. By eliminating critics rather than confronting systemic collapse, the state merely guarantees that the next eruption of unrest will be more desperate and less predictable.
For the international community, the challenge is moving beyond rhetorical condemnation toward mechanisms that hold the individual architects of this judiciary machine accountable. We must view these hangings not as isolated foreign tragedies or regional norms, but as severe human rights emergencies that demand targeted multilateral pressure. The global health and human rights communities have long recognized that the arbitrary deprivation of life by state authorities is a fundamental assault on human security. Hassan Dioband, Hamid Kazemi, and Reza Zanganeh were human beings who possessed names, families, and grievances that the state found too dangerous to tolerate. A political system that can only sustain its own equilibrium through the methodical taking of human life has already declared its own moral and structural insolvency.