There are between 500 and 1,000 women on death row in at least 42 countries, according to a 2023 report by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The countries that execute the most women are also the countries that execute the most people, namely China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
According to Amnesty International, in 2024 an unknown number of women were executed in China, two were put to death in Egypt, 30 in Iran, one in Iraq, nine in Saudi Arabia and two in Yemen. Some countries, including China, North Korea and Vietnam, do not publish accurate data.
The two main crimes for which women are sentenced to death are murder and drug trafficking. Countries with a mandatory death penalty for murder or that do not recognise gender-based violence as a mitigating circumstance are more likely to have a high number of women on death row.
Certain countries in the Gulf and south-east Asia severely criminalise drug trafficking and have a high proportion of women awaiting execution.
While some women engage in the drug trade of their own volition, a narrower range of choices for others, along with poverty, coercion, violence, manipulation and the survival needs of a family, are significant factors in their involvement.
Not all countries with the death penalty carry out executions. Women sentenced to death are usually subjected to worse living conditions in prison, such as increased security and solitary confinement.
Here are the stories of five women on death row around the world.
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US: Christa Pike
Murder
Christa Pike is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She committed murder when she was an 18-year-old with severe but untreated mental illness. She is one of 47 women on death row in the US as of October 2025.
In January 1995, Pike, along with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, and Shadolla Peterson, then 18, killed Colleen Slemmer while attending a government-run programme to help teenagers gain job skills.
The murder was sensationalised because a pentagram had been carved into Slemmer’s chest – a reflection of the satanic imagery that fascinated Shipp. The media pounced on this detail, painting Pike as a demonic killer and describing the murder as an “occult” event linked to “devil worship”.
Pike was born with brain damage caused by her mother’s alcohol abuse while pregnant. She was the victim of severe, repeated physical and sexual abuse and violence that began when she was a child.
By the time she was 18, she had been raped twice, physically abused by at least seven family members and sexually abused by at least three individuals. She has bipolar disorder and severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
In her 2021 appeal against the death sentence, it was noted that at her trial, Pike’s “state-appointed lawyers failed to present mitigating evidence of her history of sexual violence and child abuse to the jury, leaving the jurors with no reason to consider an alternative sentence to the death penalty”.
Pike spent more than 28 years in solitary confinement until she secured a lawsuit settlement exercising her right to be treated equally with men on death row, who are housed together and allowed to hold jobs.
Of the other defendants in the case, Shipp is eligible for parole in 2026 because he was 17 at the time of the crime, and Peterson was an informant who never served prison time. Pike’s execution date has been set for 30 September 2026.
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Iran: Pakhshan Azizi
Armed rebellion against the state
Branch 26 of the revolutionary court of Tehran sentenced Pakhshan Azizi to death in July 2024. The 40-year-old Kurd was convicted of armed rebellion against the state (baghi) in relation to her human rights and humanitarian work.
Between 2014 and 2022 she was providing humanitarian support to displaced women and children in camps in north-east Syria and the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
On 4 August 2023, Azizi was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin prison. She was held in solitary confinement for five months without access to a lawyer or her family.
There have been reports that she was subjected to severe psychological and physical torture to extract a confession. Several members of her family were also temporarily detained and faced national security charges. In December 2023, she was transferred to the women’s ward of Evin prison, where she remains.
In January 2025, the supreme court upheld her conviction and death sentence, and subsequently rejected her request for a judicial review.
Iran is one of the countries in the world that has executed the most people since the 1979 Islamic revolution. “Tens of thousands of prisoners, including women, have been executed following sham trials,” according to Iran Human Rights, which notes the gender-specific aspects of the death penalty in the country, such as stoning having been used disproportionately against women.
Last year, it said at least 975 people were put to death, including many human rights activists as well as drug offenders. So far this year, 31 women have been executed, surpassing the total for 2024.
In the aftermath of the “woman, life, freedom” uprising, Iranian authorities have intensified their use of the death penalty to instil fear and tighten their grip on power. According to Amnesty International, this escalation includes the use of the death penalty against women on politically motivated charges.
In an article for the US magazine the Nation, Bahar Mirhosseni, a criminal defence and human rights lawyer, wrote: “Iran’s executions not only constitute outrageous human rights violations but also function as a form of collective punishment.
“The repression is so lethal that it is now common knowledge among diverse marginalised communities within Iran, as well as abolitionists around the world, that Iran weaponises the death penalty to suppress speech.”
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Indonesia: Rosita Said
Drug trafficking
Rosita Said, 43, has been detained since 23 August 2015 in relation to a narcotics case. She was raised in West Sumatra and dropped out of education after primary school because of financial hardship. Married twice and suffering from domestic violence, she eventually moved to Jakarta in search of a better life.
While working as a shop assistant, she met a man, Emeka Samuel, who showed kindness and supported her financially. She fell in love with him, he converted to Islam, and they married.
Three months into the marriage, Said noticed that Samuel would receive calls from unknown numbers. She accused him of infidelity and he eventually admitted that the calls were related to a new business opportunity: drugs.
Said was horrified but feared another failed marriage would bring deep shame to herself and her family. According to her lawyer, Aisya Humaida, she felt trapped and when Samuel asked her to find someone to transport and handle drugs, she agreed.
At one point, she passed 5,500,000 Indonesian rupiah (£250) on to the person she had found, Rubiyanti Hasyim, at Samuel’s request, believing it to be a harmless act of assistance.
On 21 August 2015, Samuel informed Said that a drugs shipment was ready for collection. The police raided the operation, and later arrested Hasyim who said Samuel and Said were responsible.
Said was sentenced to death along with Samuel. Humaida says: “The court failed to take into account her background, the gendered vulnerabilities she faced, and her limited understanding of Samuel’s criminal activities.”
Drug-related offences are the leading cause of women’s involvement in Indonesia’s criminal justice system and the “war on drugs” has increased prison overcrowding.
A study by LBH Masyarakat (Community Legal Aid Institute), an Indonesian human rights organisation that provides free legal aid, found that 27% of 307 women surveyed who were imprisoned for drug-related crimes reported being influenced by an intimate partner.
As of August this year, there were 10 women out of 594 total inmates on death row in the country for drug crimes or murder. The quality of legal defence and the number of unfair trials have been fundamental factors in the extent of death sentences being imposed.
A study of 32 death sentences imposed on women from 2002 to 2020 found only nine defendants had offered mitigating circumstances in their trials, 20 had none, and three were sentenced without any mention of mitigation. Furthermore, eight women were sentenced to death despite not being charged with a capital offence.
There has been a de facto moratorium on executions in Indonesia since 2016.
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Tanzania: Lemi Limbu
Murder
In 2015, Lemi Limbu was convicted of the murder of her baby daughter. In Tanzania, the death penalty is the mandatory sentence for murder, but no executions have been carried out since 1994.
Limbu is in her early 30s but has the developmental age of a child. Growing up, her father beat her mother and Limbu was repeatedly raped by men in her village. She gave birth at 15 after becoming pregnant by rape.
At about 18, she married an older man and had two more children. She later fled from her husband, who beat her, and moved to a different village with her youngest child, Tabu, who was about a year old.
There she met Kijiji Nyamabu, an alcoholic, who told Limbu he would marry her but would not accept Tabu because the child had been fathered by a different man.
Shortly afterwards, Tabu was found strangled. There were no witnesses and Nyamabu had fled by the time Limbu brought the authorities to her daughter’s body. She was arrested in August 2011 but Nyamabu was never detained.
At her first trial, Limbu pleaded not guilty. Unable to read or write, she said she did not know the contents of a statement that police claimed she had made admitting to the murder. She said she was beaten, threatened at gunpoint and detained for two days at the police station.
Her original conviction in 2015 was nullified in 2019 due to procedural errors. But she remained incarcerated awaiting a new trial. In 2022, she was retried and sentenced to death a second time.
The court did not allow evidence to be heard from medical professionals about her intellectual disabilities or history of abuse. An appeal was filed in 2022 but no date for a hearing has been set.
Under international law, Limbu should not be held criminally liable, given her intellectual disability. Prof Sandra Babcock, founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and a legal consultant to Limbu, wrote that the case was “a clear example of the profoundly unjust consequences of Tanzania’s mandatory death penalty.
“Limbu has been a victim of abuse since childhood and is uniquely vulnerable because of her intellectual disability,” she said.
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Pakistan: Asiya Bibi
Blasphemy
On 20 March 2024, a court in Lahore passed a death sentence for blasphemy on Asiya Bibi*, 50 . She is illiterate and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Blasphemy is an offence punishable by death in Pakistan, although no one has ever been executed. Blasphemy laws have their origin in the British colonial era, and were designed to curb incitements to religious violence.
Sarmad Ali, who is Bibi’s lawyer, says she was found guilty of allegedly burning the Qur’an in her area of Lahore. On 30 September 2021, a Muslim cleric reported her to the police, who arrested her the same day.
In their investigation, the police found that Bibi, a Muslim, had sought help from a practitioner of black magic, who advised her to burn the Qur’an. Ali, who took Bibi’s case on in early 2022 as part of his pro bono legal work, believes she visited the witch-doctor in an effort to help her daughter find a husband.
“The prisoners who are facing blasphemy charges, whether they are under trial or convicted or condemned to death, are very vulnerable … and are jailed in very miserable conditions,” says Ali. “I would say that one day she might die in the prison.”
Ali is awaiting a new date for an appeal to be heard in Bibi’s case. It had been set for 14 March 2025 but was adjourned.
While Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have been an instrument of persecution for decades, there has been a significant rise in the number of blasphemy cases since 2022, according to Human Rights Watch.
In 2020, individuals brought 11 cases of alleged blasphemy in Pakistan, and nine in 2021. In 2024, at least 475 blasphemy cases were registered. Increasingly, those alleging blasphemy have based their accusations on comments made on social media, with the laws increasingly used to carry out personal vendettas and target members of minority religious communities.
* Asiya Bibi is not to be confused with Asia Bibi, a 53-year-old Christian Pakistani woman who spent eight years on death row on blasphemy charges and now lives at a secret location in Canada.
