Mohammad Javad Larijani

In March 2026, amid calls by several ultraconservative figures for a shift in Iranian nuclear doctrine, Larijani called on Iran to suspend its membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. His statement contributed to the controversy over a possible hardening of Iran's nuclear position.

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In July 2025, Larijani publicly suggested that a drone could strike Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In a subsequent statement, he also defended the idea that killing Trump could be a religious or legal duty in retaliation for American actions against Iran.

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A few days after his remarks targeting Trump, Larijani stated that a European city could be struck by "five drones" and that Europeans could no longer consider themselves safe, amid growing tensions with Western powers.

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Iranian documents and media accused Mohammad Javad Larijani of unlawfully occupying at least 342 hectares of national land in the Varamin region. In July 2012, the head of the Tehran provincial judiciary confirmed that a case had been opened and was under review. Years later, according to Iranian reports, the judiciary's spokesperson stated that the case had been examined twice and closed without an offence being established.

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During Iran's Universal Periodic Review and in subsequent statements, Larijani defended the Iranian judicial system against Western criticism concerning executions, minority rights and social norms, challenging the notion that Iran should adopt a Western human rights model.

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In March 2013, Larijani stated that homosexuality was an "illness" and defended Iranian laws criminalising it, rejecting international criticism on the subject.

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In several public statements, Larijani rejected the classification of punishments under Iranian law as torture and defended the use of flogging, amputation, stoning and capital punishment in the name of Iran's Islamic legal and cultural system.

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In the context of Jafar Kiani's stoning, Mohammad Javad Larijani, then a senior judicial official responsible for human rights, described the particular execution as a "judicial error" while defending stoning as a recognised punishment under Iranian law and disputing its classification as torture.

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