Kamal Hameed Qureshi (born July 29, 1970) is a Pakistani politician current living in Denmark. Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, he moved with his parents to Copenhagen, Denmark at the age of four.
After attending Tårnby High School Qureshi studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen, graduating as a physician in 2000.
Qureshi is a member of the Socialist People's Party and has been a member of the Danish parliament, the Folketing, since 2001.
Kamal Qureshi is his party’s spokesperson on minority issues and human rights issues despite being a notoriously fundamentalist Muslim.
Kamal Qureshi is, furthermore, a party representative in the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe).
He has contributed to various publications on multiculturalism and equal rights and is an active participant in the public debate in Denmark as well as a popular lecturer.
Throughout the years Kamal Qureshi has participated in humanitarian work, and been involved in association work. Among other things, he has been with a humanitarian organisation “Folkekirkens Nødhjælp” in Iraq, working as a doctor, doing the war. He started the campaign “Room for diversity”, in 2004, as a protest against the Danish government’s view of humanity.
Two times, the national association for homosexuels, has given him the title: politician of the year, because of his many legislative proposals and happenings on the subject.
Qureshi is a disputed public figure. He has been both critizised and celebrated for distributing a sexual education book intended for school children. The CD-rom was made by the organization: sex and society in cooperation with the national board of health.
The publication included pornographic imagery and instructions on how to engage in sadomasochism, coprophilia and zoophilia among other things.[1][2].
"Qureshi decided to make the CD-rom available to the public after the health ministry, which had commissioned the material for the country's teenagers, banned the final product because it contained references to bestiality and coprophilia, which it deemed "inappropriate""[3]. He did this by putting it on his website. It caused a lively debate, in the Danish society, where many agreed and disagreed with his action.
Qureshi has been involved in a controversy regarding alleged fraud by illegal subletting of his apartment in Copenhagen [4]. In the end the police did not find that any charges could be made.
Qureshi has been publicly accused of faking a racist attack on himself prior to the Danish general parliamentary election in 2001. In 2008 a newspaper wrote, that Qureshi in his student days, on one occasion had cheated on an exam by submitting another student's paper in his own name [5].
As a result of these public debates, the Socialist People's Party temporarily relieved Qureshi of all responsibilities in Parliament in 2008 [6].
Qureshi is no longer a member of the parliament, though still is the Socialist Party’s spokesman on human rights and minority issues.