Born in 1960, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi attended the seminary in Qom and earned a Ph.D in law from Shahid Motahari University.
He started his career as a prosecutor in the early 1980s, and rose from being prosecutor general of Tehran in 1994 to chief justice of the country by 2019.
His two years as Iran’s chief justice were marked by the intensified repression of dissent and human rights abuses, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran.
Raisi became president of Iran on June 19, 2021, after winning a historically uncompetitive presidential election. Many reform-minded Iranians had refused to take part in an election widely seen as a foregone conclusion. Overall voter turnout was only 48.8% – the lowest since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.
The US Department of the Treasury sanctioned Raisi in November 2019, citing his participation in the 1988 “death commission” as a prosecutor, and a United Nations report indicating that Iran’s judiciary approved the execution of at least nine children between 2018 and 2019.
He is the first elected Iranian leader to be under U.S. sanctions.
In June 2021, he ran against his predecessor, former President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, and won 18 million of the nearly 29 million ballots cast. His inauguration was seen to signal the start of a new, harder-line era that could herald major shifts in the Islamic Republic’s policies at home and abroad.
Raisi has long opposed engagement with the West, and is a close ally of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
Read more details about Raisi’s life here.