“Killing sprees” in Iran and Iraq were responsible for a global rise in capital punishment in 2013, according to a new Amnesty International report described Thursday by a range of outlets.

At least 778 executions were known to have been carried out globally in 2013, 538 of them in Iran and Iraq alone, showed the 62-page report published on Thursday. It was up from 682 executions in 2012.

“The killing sprees we saw in countries like Iran and Iraq were shameful,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary general. “Only a small number of countries carried out the vast majority of these senseless state-sponsored killings.

Tehran publicly admitted to executing at least 369 people in 2013 – roughly 15 percent more than in the previous year – but is widely suspected of having conducted another 250 or so executions in secret.

The U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran has repeatedly emphasized – most recently last week – that there has been no fundamental change in the Islamic Republic’s human rights approach since the inauguration of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and he has more specifically declared that its capital punishment policies “contraven[e] universally accepted human rights principles and norms.”

The assessments are in line with statements made by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. Zeya expanded on the point, noting that the U.S. has “seen little meaningful improvement in human rights in Iran under the new government, including torture, political imprisonment, [and] harassment of religious and ethnic minorities.”

[Photo: AsadBrn / YouTube]