If the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, goes ahead with plans to livestream the execution of a soldier radicalised to extremist Islam who killed 13 people at a military base in Texas, his country will join a motley assembly of lesser powers and rogue actors who have conducted public executions in recent years. Only two countries currently systematically carry out capital sentences in public: Iran and Afghanistan. In 2025, the Taliban authorities carried out six such killings and the regime in Tehran 11, according to Amnesty International.
In April last year, the Taliban executed four men accused of murder in three different cities. All were shot dead in crowded public sports stadiums. Such events were common when the hardline Islamist militia movement was in power in the late 1990s.
Then as now, the Taliban claimed a due court process had been followed. In July, two young men accused of killing police officers were hanged by Iranian authorities in the central square of Isfahan, Iran. Human rights monitors have reported about 30 public executions in Ithe country in the last five years, with an intensification in recent months after massive popular unrest earlier this year and the war with the US and Israel.
Historically, many hangings have been carried out using a crane as a makeshift gallows. Saudi Arabia appears to have ended the practice after decades of beheading convicted criminals in a square in the capital, Riyadh, and sometimes publicly in provincial cities. Legal experts and historians argue that public executions perform different functions.
If the rule of law is shaky or there is doubt about the efficacy of the criminal justice system, they offer authorities seeking to win support a way of convincing the community that criminals will be punished. Such public spectacles can also be a way of cowing a population through terror. Armed militant groups have frequently resorted to public executions – often in an effort to assert their authority.
Islamic State, which ruled a swath of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, conducted thousands of executions for alleged offences ranging from homosexuality to theft. Many of the executions took place in public or were videoed. A large number were deliberately choreographed to provide a spectacle for broadcast to terrorise enemies and potential dissidents as well as to radicalise IS supporters and attract new ones.
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