Rasmus Paludan (born 2 January 1982) is a Danish-Swedish politician and lawyer, who is the founder and leader of the far-right nationalist Danish political party Stram Kurs.

[24][25] In 2020, the channel was shut down by YouTube, citing that their guidelines prohibit harassment and hate speech directed at individuals or groups based on race or religion.

[29] In 2021, he was found guilty of racist and derogatory statements, and received a conditional sentence of 3 months in prison and had to pay compensation to the offended, a Somali woman.

[66] After disturbances at Paludan's demonstration in Nørrebro in Copenhagen in April 2019 gave him massive press coverage, the party collected the necessary number of signatures to become eligible for the 2019 general election.

[70] One of the first times Paludan noticed himself in the media was in 2007, when he launched a website,[24][73] on which he published pictures of cyclists and pedestrians who violated the traffic law.

I continued until I wasn't attacked, and this year I gave a speech in front of BumZen on the anniversary of the clearing of the Youth House, without anything happening.

"On 25 January 2017, Paludan appeared at the People's House in Nørrebro to interview participants in the left-wing assembly, where one of the items on the agenda was a discussion of "the militant resistance".

[84] Paludan has especially organised demonstrations in the country's "vulnerable residential areas", where he has made hostile statements about Islam,[22] has spat on, thrown and burned the Quran[22] and encouraged people to urinate on it[23] and has featured satirical drawings of Muhammad.

[90] In 2020, the channel was shut down by YouTube, citing that their guidelines prohibit harassment and hate speech directed at individuals or groups based on race or religion.

Three people were arrested, and in June 2019, a 24-year-old Danish-Syrian man was sentenced to 60 days in jail, deportation, and a ban from returning to Denmark for six years for having thrown a rock at Paludan.

[91] Paludan's statements and methods have met with criticism from a number of politicians and media persons, while several of these have, however, defended his actions as a part of his right to express himself.

[93] In connection with this, the then Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, tweeted that he strongly distanced himself from Paludan's provocations, but called for meeting them with arguments rather than violence.

[100] Paludan soon after began to hold a series of demonstrations in Sweden, while Stram Kurs worked in parallel to become eligible for registration in Denmark.

[104] The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, stated that Sweden should no longer expect Turkish support for their NATO membership.

[107][104][108] Paludan stated on 26 January that he would burn a Quran every Friday in front of the Turkish embassy in Copenhagen until Turkey is ready to ratify Sweden's application for NATO membership.

[106] In July 2023, a court in Ankara, Turkey, officially issued an arrest warrant for Paludan for "publicly insulting religious values" as a result of having burned a Quran in front of their embassy.

[113] In May 2023, it was announced that Paludan would be arrested immediately if he set foot in Sweden, as he was investigated for racial hatred offences, insult and gross abuse against a public official.

[121] Two former operational chiefs of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET), Hans Jørgen Bonnichsen and Frank Jensen, assessed in April 2019 that Paludan was in mortal danger as a result of his provocations.

[140] A number of national newspapers, including Politiken, Berlingske, Jyllands-Posten, Information, Ekstra Bladet and B.T., argued in leading articles in favour of Paludan's right to freedom of expression and religious criticism following the unrest in connection with a demonstration at Nørrebro in April 2019.

[141] However, Kristeligt Dagblad wrote that freedom of speech has and should have boundaries and that the abolished blasphemy paragraph could have been "an instrument to protect public order".

In September 2018, the spokesman for the Socialist People's Party, Karsten Hønge, stated that the police protection should cease and that Paludan should demonstrate at his own risk.

[142] In May 2019, Denmark's then Minister of Justice, Søren Pape Poulsen, stated that it is important to defend Paludan's right to demonstrate, although he is both "uneducated and unsympathetic".

[147] Lecturer in history at Roskilde University Center Claus Bundgård Christensen, who is also an expert on Nazism, does not believe that Paludan is a Nazi.

[65][153] According to Paludan, such a ban would not be unconstitutional, since, according to Article 67[154] of the Constitution, freedom of religion is limited in that "nothing is taught or done that is contrary to morality or public order".

[156][157] Paludan has called for putting expelled foreign citizens unwilling and unable to travel back to their country in detention camps in North-Eastern Greenland.

[28] Jacob Mchangama, who is the director of the legal think tank Justitia, has criticized Paludan for operating with double standards for free speech and for bringing "a series of patently baseless libel cases":[28] Paludan operates with two different standards of freedom of expression: one that applies to himself and which is almost unlimited, and then one that applies to his opponents and which is almost non-existent when it comes to criticism of himself.

So do the threats of imprisonment for "treason" against political opponents.Paludan has voiced criticism of the police and the lawyers employed by them, just as he has led a number of complaints against specific officers.

[181] Paludan has since 2014 worked as an independent lawyer[24] and has been a defender of the self-proclaimed freedom activist Lars Kragh Andersen[182][183] – who in 2015 received a 30-day suspended sentence for, among other things, publishing social security numbers belonging to the then Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and the then Minister of Defense, Nicolai Wammen[182][183] – and has also been a defender of the provocative artist Uwe Max Jensen,[184][185][186] who is friends with Paludan privately[163] and has also been a candidate for Stram Kurs.

[188] In 2017, Paludan was appointed to defend a 42-year-old North Jutland man who, as the first in 46 years, stood accused of blasphemy, after he had burned a copy of the Quran in his garden and published a video of the act on Facebook.

The reason was that, in connection with several cases, Paludan had called named police officers and prosecutors corrupt, possible criminals and high-level amateurs.