The conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, the 61-year old new president-elect of Iran, heralds from a remote village in the northeast of the country, and after Friday’s election victory, will take up residence in the presidential palace. He has taken on a number of influential roles in the Islamic Republic, most notably as Chief of the Judiciary, and his track record comes with a long list of alleged human rights violations.

As predicted, Raisi won the Islamic Republic’s presidential election with a landslide margin, on Friday with 61.9%, around 17.9 million votes. By contrast, the main rival, reformist Abdolnaser Hemmati, could only obtain just under 2.5 million votes.

Crucially, however, the vote was marred by a low turnout — which the regime considers a key factor in justifying its legitimacy — with a turnout of 48.8%, the lowest turnout of all presidential elections since the 1979 revolution. In the run-up to the election, many Iranians had already decided to give up on the election, saying they felt no representation on either side of the political spectrum.

Early life and career

For many observers, Raisi is not a particularly complex figure. His career, ideology and political ambitions have been well-charted over the decades.

“Raisi is just a soldier. A good one actually. Someone who exactly executes what he is asked with all his might,” Roya Boroumand, Washington-based historian, and executive director of Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, an NGO dedicated to the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran, told ABC News. “It is why he constantly got promoted since he joined the judiciary and became prosecutor of Karaj — a city close to Tehran — without proper qualification.”

He was appointed to the role in Karaj at just 20 years old, according to his official website. Only five years later he was promoted as the deputy prosecutor of the revolutionary court of Tehran which he served until 1989, a far more influential role in the judiciary.

At the time, the judiciary was a particularly important tool for the regime to clamp down on political opponents and those whose activities were criminalized under new laws on public morality.

“It is why people like Raisi were brought into the judiciary, so they could quickly settle the cases, mostly by issuing execution sentences,” Boroumand said.

1988 mass executions

According to an Amnesty International report in 2018, Raisi was a member of a four-member board known as the “Death Committee.” Along with three other judiciary officials of the time, he presided over the execution of thousands of prisoners — mostly affiliated with the left and communist political groups and parties. The majority of these prisoners had already finished their prison sentences, and were executed on the grounds that they did not “express repentance for their past political beliefs and activities and denounce their political groups in writing,” Amnesty said.

“In many cases, reactions to crimes related to human rights when they have happened inside a country’s territory does not go beyond [issuing] statements,” said Ankara-based Mousa Barzin, law researcher and former lawyer, to ABC News. “Any legal reaction is affected by so many political considerations.”

The Iranian regime has consistently denied reports of human rights abuses by international organizations.

In 2019, 31 years after the mass execution of prisoners in Iran, Raisi, along with several other members of Ayatollah Khamenei’s inner circle, was placed under sanctions by former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. Among the reasons given by U.S. Treasury Department was Raisi’s “administrative oversight over the executions of individuals who were juveniles at the time of their crime and the torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners in Iran, including amputations.”

The European Union also froze Raisi’s assets and issued a travel ban for his role in human rights violations, but restrictions on his movement will not necessarily apply now that he is president and enjoys “diplomatic privileges,” according to Barzin.

Raisi continued to serve in major roles in the judiciary until 2015, when he was catapulted into the influential position of Custodian of Astan Qods, a joint political and religious role that carries with it enormous wealth.

He used that position to establish a strong base in rural areas. However, he lost the 2017 presidential election to the now outgoing Hassan Rouhani. For many Iranians, it was the first time they heard Raisi’s name, and started to understand his hard-line approach to domestic and international policies.

At the time he criticized President Rouhani for taking a wrong path in solving economic problems of the country by relying on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and negotiating with the West from an inferior position. In 2015, Rouhani signed the JCPOA with the U.S. and western powers, which saw them promise to limit Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. In 2018, however, President Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal and applied a policy of “maximum pressure” on the regime.

After losing the election, Ayatollah Kahmenei appointed Raisi to head of the judiciary in 2018. His avowed goal has been to root out corruption, but for observers such promises ring hollow.

“It is a sheer lie. He would only go after minor culprits, because all in power know they should never target those in the main power circle,” Borouman said.

Iran-US relations and hard-line policies

To Raisi, however, there is little difference between President Joe Biden’s administration and that of Trump’s. Americans can expect more fiery rhetoric even as the outgoing presidency hopes to revive the nuclear deal.

“Americans have always pursued arrogant plans towards the Iranian people, and every government that came to power followed this policy,” Raisi said in April before he ran for president, according to ISNA, the Iranian Students News Agency.

Raisi’s approach to domestic issues centers on concerns about free access to the Internet and the mandatory imposition of the hijab, which are in line with other hard-liners in Iran.

“The preservation of moral values in society is a requirement of Sharia, a requirement of law and civil rights… [Refusing to wear appropriate hijab] does not comply with our national law and culture in any way,” Raisi said in a speech in July 2020.

In his failed 2017 presidential campaign, Raisi also emphasized the necessity of providing a national intranet along the global internet. That stance has been a cause for concern for many Iranian people and human rights activists, who fear that would restrict the public free access to information.

While he is a familiar face for Iran’s observers and his policy agenda is well-publicized, civil unrest — sparked by economic hardship brought on by the devastating impact of U.S. sanctions, political corruption and COVID-19 — continues to threaten the regime, and a revival of the nuclear deal will reposition the country on the international scene. Raisi comes to power at a crucial time in Iran’s history.

NEW YORK — The declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday is putting the pressure on more U.S. companies to give their employees the day off, accelerating a movement that took off last year in response to the racial justice protests that swept the country.

Hundreds of top companies had already pledged last year to observe Juneteenth in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the national reckoning on racism that followed.

But most private companies take their cues from the federal government — the country’s largest employer — in drawing up their holiday calendars. President Joe Biden signed legislation Thursday establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery, following the passage of a bipartisan Congressional bill.

More than 800 companies have publicly pledged to observe Juneteenth, according to HellaCreative, a group of Black creative professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area that launched a campaign last year to build corporate support for making the June 19th an official holiday. That is nearly double the number of companies that had joined the pledge last year.

Patagonia, the outdoor apparel retailer, announced that all of its U.S. stores will be closed Saturday, and its corporate offices would be closed Monday. Other brands, including Target, J.C. Penney and Best Buy had pledged last year to adopt Juneteenth as a paid holiday, though they are keeping stores open. Several major banks have said employees will get a floating paid day off.

Many companies, however, had little time to shuffle their holiday calendars. Some offered employees a regular paid day off or promised to consider adding it to their calendars next year.

Nasdaq said its U.S. exchange would stay open Friday and Monday “to maintain a fair and orderly market and to minimize operational risks” but that it would discuss its future holiday schedule with regulators and companies.

State governments that had not already declared Juneteenth a holiday were also scrambling to respond the new federal holiday. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced that all state government offices will be closed Friday, superseding a state law signed just two days earlier that would have made June 19 a state holiday next year.

Even though federal holidays like Thanksgiving are widely observed, private companies are under no obligation to offer any particular day off. But since many workers don’t know that, they will likely wonder why they are not getting a paid holiday for Juneteenth this year, said Carolina Valencia, a director in research firm Gartner’s human resource practice.

In an era of increasing employee activism and a fierce competition for talent, Valencia said she expects the number of companies offering Juneteenth to surge next year after employers have had more time to react.

“Many employees are going to resent their employers for not giving them the holiday because they don’t understand that it’s a complicated process,” Valencia said.

But she said the devil will be in the details. Many companies will likely offer it as a floating day off, making it unlikely that Juneteenth will become a national holiday on par with July 4th or Memorial Day anytime soon.

And many notable companies have not joined the movement. Walmart, which employs 300,000 Black hourly workers and is the country’s largest private sector employer, told The Associated Press in an email that its employees are free to use paid time off to observe any holiday they wish, including Juneteenth.

Raheem Thompson, a social media specialist for a retail company, said he was disappointed he didn’t get a paid day off. Instead, he said the company sent an email acknowledging the federal holiday and pledging to consider time off in the future.

“It’s kind of bare minimum,” said Thompson, who lives in Atlanta but didn’t want his company named for fear of repercussions. “I don’t think as people of color, we really care that you acknowledge it via email … that doesn’t really have any true meaning to it.”

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas — two months after the Confederacy had surrendered. That was also about 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Southern states.

Black Americans, especially in Texas, have long celebrated Juneteenth with church picnics and speeches. But the federal holiday declaration brought it to the attention of some Americans for the first time.

Jamie Hickey, founder small fitness company in Philadelphia, said he had never heard of Juneteenth until he heard about it last week on the radio. Then, his four trainers started talking about it at lunch, and he asked them if it was important to them. He decided to make it a day off next year since it was too late to cancel on clients this year.

“They said, ‘are you serious, you are just now hearing about this?’” said Hickey, who founded Truism Fitness last year after the chain fitness company where he and he other trainers worked closed because of the pandemic.

Hickey said he took the lead from his employees because, as a white man, he worried about jumping into trends only to be accused of tokenism.

“I don’t want to fake. If you are fake, you get caught and it’s a million times worse,” Hickey said.

That’s a major concern among even the biggest employees, said Erin Eve, CEO of Ichor Strategies, which advises firm on connecting businesses with their communities. Eve said companies will get called out by their employees, customers and even investors if they take steps like observing Juneteenth without investing in Black communities or looking at their own internal diversity.

Still, Eve said the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday will make companies that don’t follow suit increasingly look bad.

“For current employees, it will reaffirm a dissonance with their values,” Eve said.

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Associated Press Writers Urooba Jamal, Anne D’Innocenzio, Michelle Chapman and Roger Schneider contributed to this story.