In Afghanistan, four men publicly executed in crowded stadiums (2025)

Four men were publicly executed in Afghanistan on Friday, April 11, the Supreme Court said, the highest number of executions to be carried out in one day since the Taliban's return to power. The executions at sports stadiums in three separate provinces brought to 10 the number of men publicly put to death since 2021, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally.

Public executions were common during the Taliban's first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most carried out publicly in sports stadiums.

The men had been "sentenced to retaliatory punishment" for shooting other men, after their cases were "examined very precisely and repeatedly," the Supreme Court said in a statement. The families of the victims turned down the opportunity to offer the men amnesty, it said. Afghans had been invited to "attend the event" in official notices shared widely on Thursday.

Amnesty International called on the Taliban authorities to halt public executions, which it called a "gross affront to human dignity."

The most recent execution was in November 2024, when a convicted murderer was shot three times in the chest by a member of the victim's family in front of thousands of spectators, including high-ranking Taliban officials, at a stadium in Gardez, the capital of eastern Paktia province.

Corporal punishment – mainly flogging – has been common under the Taliban authorities and employed for crimes including theft, adultery and alcohol consumption. However, all execution orders are signed by the Taliban's reclusive Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, who lives in the movement's heartland of Kandahar.

'Eye for an eye'

Akhundzada ordered judges in 2022 to fully implement all aspects of the Taliban government's interpretation of Islamic law – including "eye-for-an-eye" punishments known as "qisas," allowing for the death penalty in retribution for the crime of murder. Law and order is central to the severe ideology of the Taliban, which emerged from the chaos of a civil war following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989.

One of the most infamous images from their first rule depicted the 1999 execution of a woman wearing an all-covering burqa in a Kabul stadium. She had been accused of killing her husband. The United Nations and rights groups such as Amnesty have condemned the Taliban government's use of corporal punishment and the death penalty.

Amnesty included Afghanistan in countries where "death sentences were known to have been imposed after proceedings that did not meet international fair trial standards", the non-governmental organization said in its annual report on death sentences published in April. The report said Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia were responsible for 91 percent of known executions last year, with increases in death sentences in all three countries spurring a global rise.

The 1,518 executions recorded worldwide in 2024 did not include thousands of people believed to have been executed in China – the world's leading exponent of capital punishment –Amnesty said.