Yasmin Qureshi

Yasmin Qureshi is a British Labour Party politician and barrister, born at Gujrat, Punjab, on 5 July 1963. She was MP for Bolton South East from 2010 to 2024 and has represented Bolton South and Walkden since 2024. ¹

Before Parliament she headed the criminal legal section of the UN Mission in Kosovo, where she later became Director of the Department of Judicial Administration. ¹

Yasmin Qureshi was born in Gujrat City, Pakistan, and moved to Britain when she was nine. Her father was an engineer, the family lived in Watford, and she is the youngest of three children. ¹

She attended what is now London South Bank University and graduated with a BA (Hons) in law, sat her Bar examinations at the Council of Legal Education, and gained a Master of Laws at University College London. ¹

She began her legal career with the Crown Prosecution Service as an in-house barrister. She headed the criminal legal section of the UN Mission in Kosovo, was co-ordinator of its Criminal Legal Unit from 2000 to 2001, and was then appointed Director of the Department of Judicial Administration in Kosovo. ¹

She then worked as a human rights advisor to the former London mayor Ken Livingstone from 2004 to 2008, chaired the Human Rights and Civil Liberties Working Group of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, and undertook community legal work for over twenty years. ¹

She joined the Labour Party at sixteen and stood unsuccessfully in Brent East in 2005. She was elected in 2010 for Bolton South East with 18,782 votes. In 2010 Qureshi, Rushanara Ali and Shabana Mahmood became Britain's first female Muslim MPs, and Qureshi was also the first woman elected MP for Bolton South East. ¹

She served on the Justice, Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs committees, was appointed Shadow Minister for Justice in 2016 and Shadow Minister for International Development in 2020, and resigned from the frontbench in November 2023 to vote for a motion demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. ¹

In 2024 she was appointed Chair of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and UK Trade Envoy to Egypt. ¹

Since 2011 Qureshi has campaigned for justice for the parents and children affected by Primodos, a historic hormone pregnancy test used in the 1960s and 1970s, and has worked for a formal inquiry into what she describes as a cover-up of information about it. In 2017 she told the Commons that a report on Primodos had been condemned across the House as a whitewash and as misleading. ¹

She has also called on the government to condemn the Rohingya crisis and work internationally for a rapid end to it, and campaigned to have upskirting criminalised as a specific sexual offence. ¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. In a 2014 parliamentary debate on Palestine, Qureshi compared the taking of Jewish people's property in the Holocaust with events in Gaza. The Holocaust Educational Trust criticised her words, and she apologised to any who were offended, saying she had not meant to equate the events and that the Holocaust was the most brutal act of genocide of the twentieth century, according to the article. ¹

In 2014 she opposed mandatory labelling of meat slaughtered by halal and kosher methods, saying the claim that such methods are more painful than stunning was incorrect. ¹

Qureshi was nominated for Politician of the Year at the British Muslim Awards in 2013 and 2015 and won the award in 2014. In 2021 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bolton for her contribution to politics and the local community. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.