Born in 1960, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi attended the Qom seminary and earned a doctorate in law from Shahid Motahari University.
He began his career as a prosecutor in the early 1980s and rose from being Tehran's attorney general in 1994 to chief justice of the country's Supreme Court in 2019.
His two years as chief justice of Iran's Supreme Court were marked by intensified repression of dissent and human rights abuses, according to Iran's Center for Human Rights.
Raisi assumed the presidency of Iran on June 19, 2021, after winning a historically uncompetitive presidential election. Many reformist Iranians had refused to participate in an election that many considered a foregone conclusion. Overall voter turnout was only 48.8%, the lowest since the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.
The US Treasury Department 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 US sanctions.
In June 2021, he ran against his predecessor, former President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, and won 18 million of the nearly 29 million votes cast. His inauguration was seen as ushering in a new, harder-line era that could herald major changes 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.
