Iranian authorities executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 and now risk hanging more in the wake of the war against the US and Israel, two NGOs said Monday, urging the West to put capital punishment "at the heart" of any negotiations with Tehran.

The number of executions represented an increase of 68% on the 975 people Iran put to death in 2024, and also included 48 women, Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) said in their joint annual report.

If the Islamic republic "survives the current crisis, there is a serious risk that executions will be used even more extensively as a tool of oppression and repression," the report said.

IHR – which requires two sources to confirm an execution, the majority of which are not reported in Iranian official media – said the figure represented an "absolute minimum" for the number of hangings in 2025.

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The report said the number of executions was by far the highest since IHR began tracking it in 2008, and was the most reported since 1989, in the earlier years of the Islamic revolution.

Raphael Chenuil-Hazan, executive director of ECPM, said the question of abolition of the death penalty needed to be "at the heart" of any talks between Iran and the West on ending the conflict that is currently on hold with a ceasefire.

"Be strong, put the death penalty in all the deals," he told reporters at a news conference in Paris, adding that the "reality is the same" even after more than five weeks of war that saw the killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam lamented that after US-Iran talks in Islamabad at the weekend that failed to agree on a breakthrough, there was "no mention of the Iranian people's rights in any of those negotiations."

A moratorium on the use of the death penalty and the release of all political prisoners must be "demand number one" in talks, he said.