86 Facts About Rasmus Paludan

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

Rasmus Paludan is considered by political scientists and media to be far-right and a right-wing extremist.

Rasmus Paludan is known for his Islamophobic and "Islam-critical" events and demonstrations, which are often held in urban areas with many Muslim immigrants, initially in Denmark.

Rasmus Paludan has particularly attracted attention by recording videos of his demonstrations and uploading them to the Stram Kurs party's YouTube channel.

Rasmus Paludan has been involved in and subject to a number of lawsuits, legal disputes, and criminal charges.

Rasmus Paludan is the brother of poet Tine Paludan and writer Martin Paludan, who was a former social media manager for The Alternative.

Rasmus Paludan's mother married his Swedish father, Tomas Polvall, in 1979 thereby acquiring the right to Swedish citizenship.

Rasmus Paludan began studying law in 2001 and in 2008 became a Master of Law from the University of Copenhagen.

Rasmus Paludan had the year's ninth highest grade point average after his Bachelor of Arts.

In 2014, Rasmus Paludan was commissioned as a lawyer with the right to appear before the High Court.

From 2015 to 2018, Rasmus Paludan was employed as an external lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen, where several students complained to the student management about Rasmus Paludan's teaching and behaviour.

Rasmus Paludan has stated that those who know him know that he is "out of category".

Rasmus Paludan has described himself as principled and added that he is so to such an extent that it has probably limited his circle of friends.

Rasmus Paludan's father rejects the idea that the accident caused any significant mental changes in his son.

In 2020, Rasmus Paludan founded the Church of Saint James the Moor-slayer with himself as Archbishop, named after the Spanish legendary figure James Matamoros who helped the Christians conquer the Muslim Moors as part of the Reconquista.

Rasmus Paludan attempted to register the church in Sweden in 2022.

Rasmus Paludan has been a member of the Danish Social Liberal Party and in 2010 of Venstre.

In 2009, Rasmus Paludan ran for the European Parliament for the June Movement without being elected.

In 2016, Rasmus Paludan started attending meetings of the International Free Press Society.

In January 2017, Rasmus Paludan said that he was a member of and a lawyer for the far right Islam-critical association For Frihed.

Rasmus Paludan has on several occasions given speeches at the association's events and participated in the association's demonstrations.

In January 2017, Rasmus Paludan said that he had been a member of the political party New Right since September 2016.

Rasmus Paludan was nominated by the party as a candidate for Copenhagen's Citizens' Representative on 28 January 2017.

Subsequently, Rasmus Paludan reported that he had joined the nationalist party Danish Unity.

However, Rasmus Paludan was never accepted into the party, as it found several of his statements "out of step with Danish Unity's basic view".

In 2017, Rasmus Paludan ran for Stram Kurs in the municipal elections in Copenhagen without getting enough votes for a place in the Citizens' Representation.

The Copenhagen Post noted in May 2019 that "Rasmus Paludan has become a paladin for some and sits at an astonishing 2.6 percent in the polls".

Rasmus Paludan was the party's leading candidate in the Zealand constituency and received just under 10,000 personal votes.

In December 2019, Rasmus Paludan was ranked number 18 on Politiken's list of opinion leaders of the year.

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

Rasmus Paludan said he did it to reduce the number of people killed in traffic and to make people think twice.

In 2008, it was reported in Jyllands-Posten that Rasmus Paludan had reported a 21-year-old man to the police under Section 266 b of the Criminal Code for making offensive statements about homosexuals in a Facebook group.

In February 2016, Rasmus Paludan brought a gun dummy to a meeting of the Lars Vilks Committee at Christiansborg.

Rasmus Paludan later said that it was part of the artwork Toys at Christiansborg; the work was intended to illustrate that the police react excessively to harmless incidents, while at the same time, they react unsatisfactorily to real terrorist threats.

Rasmus Paludan was questioned by the police but got his dummy back without being charged.

Rasmus Paludan said he had erected a similar piece of art in a shopping mall in Orange County, California; here he was interrogated by the police and expelled from the shopping centre for five years.

In January 2017, Rasmus Paludan introduced the media channel Voice of Freedom.

The media is registered with the Press Board, and Rasmus Paludan is its editor-in-chief.

Rasmus Paludan was told to leave the area and had to flee from shelling and threats of violence.

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

In June 2020, Rasmus Paludan held a demonstration in Aarhus, when a 52-year-old man pulled out a knife, entered the cordoned-off area, and ran towards Rasmus Paludan.

In connection with a planned Quran burning in Malmo, Sweden in August 2020, Rasmus Paludan was banned from entering Sweden for two years, but in October he was granted Swedish citizenship due to his father's citizenship.

Rasmus Paludan had his Swedish citizenship confirmed in 2020 and thus obtained the right to stand in the Swedish parliamentary elections.

In February 2022, Rasmus Paludan stated that he planned to stand for the parliamentary elections in September.

On 21 January 2023, Rasmus Paludan burned a Quran in front of the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm, which along with other burnings was later said to "have ignited an enormous global controversy".

Rasmus Paludan received threats from Islamic State supporters in response to the burning of the Quran, which they perceived as a declared war by the West against Islam, and vowed revenge.

Rasmus Paludan announced he had no intentions of entering Sweden again.

In November 2024, Rasmus Paludan was convicted by courts in Sweden for his remarks and was sentenced to up to four months' imprisonment.

The Danish Folketing was divided on the issue, but voted to ban the burning of the Quran in December 2023, which Rasmus Paludan described as a "great success".

Rasmus Paludan has received numerous death threats, and in March 2019, a person was charged and remanded in custody for threatening Rasmus Paludan's life.

Bonnichsen and Jensen assessed that Rasmus Paludan's activities contributed to increasing the overall terrorist threat against Denmark's population.

In October 2019, Rasmus Paludan was temporarily banned by the Copenhagen Police from demonstrating in the police district, since the Center for Terror Analysis had assessed the current terrorist threat against Rasmus Paludan as "very serious" due to a "specific threat".

In September 2020, Rasmus Paludan was put on Al-Qaeda's death list, and according to Rasmus Paludan, PET therefore chose to tighten security around him.

Rasmus Paludan activated his burglar alarm, but the two men fled on bicycles after one pushed and kicked Rasmus Paludan.

In June 2020, during one of his demonstrations, Rasmus Paludan was threatened by a man armed with a knife in Gellerupparken in Aarhus.

Rasmus Paludan was evacuated by the police, who shot the man in the leg after firing warning shots.

Police protection of Rasmus Paludan had, from 1 January 2019, until the general election on 5 June of that year cost 100 million kr.

The cost of police protection of Rasmus Paludan has been debated several times in the media by politicians and opinion makers.

Lecturer in history at Roskilde University Center Claus Bundgard Christensen, who is an expert on Nazism, does not believe that Rasmus Paludan is a Nazi.

Rasmus Paludan believes that Islam should be banned in Denmark, and a ban is part of Stram Kurs's political program.

Rasmus Paludan has warned several times about the Great Replacement, a white-nationalist conspiracy theory that European populations are gradually being replaced by Muslim immigrants and their descendants.

Rasmus Paludan claimed in a party leadership debate during the 2019 general election that the ethnic Danish population is approaching becoming a minority due to a higher birth rate among Muslims in Denmark, and Rasmus Paludan has claimed on several occasions that it will be a reality within a few decades.

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

Rasmus Paludan has been involved in a number of lawsuits and legal disputes; he himself has been sued at various courts and has been behind several lawsuits and complaints himself.

Jacob Mchangama, who is the director of the legal think tank Justitia, has criticized Rasmus Paludan for operating with double standards for free speech and for bringing "a series of patently baseless libel cases":.

Rasmus 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.

Rasmus 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.

In 2008, Rasmus Paludan founded the association Danish Center for Complaints about the Police to combat the current police complaint system.

Rasmus Paludan has filed at least 18 complaints against specific officers without success, and he has sought access to the personnel information of at least 81 police officers and 16 police prosecutors.

In 2006, Rasmus Paludan sued two members of the Young Conservatives for libellous statements.

In 2015, Rasmus Paludan was fined ten daily fines of 400 kr in the Eastern High Court for insulting a police assistant from the Copenhagen Police.

In connection with a restraining order case, Rasmus Paludan wrote three e-mails to the police assistant; in the emails, Rasmus Paludan called the police assistant a "criminal snot puppy" and "fascist stormtrooper", among other things.

In June 2020, Rasmus Paludan was indicted for 14 offenses by the State Attorney in Copenhagen.

In 2013, Rasmus Paludan was issued a restraining order by the Copenhagen Police against seeking out a former fellow student from the Latin studies at the University of Copenhagen.

The five-year restraining order was issued after Rasmus Paludan had harassed the fellow student for several years.

Rasmus Paludan was later recognized as a Swedish citizen by the Migration Board and therefore cannot be refused entry.

On 20 March 2023, Rasmus Paludan was banned from entering the United Kingdom, after stating he would burn a copy of the Quran in the city of Wakefield during an upcoming visit in support of four pupils at a Wakefield school who had been suspended over damaging a Quran.

Rasmus Paludan has led a number of cases on the use of medical cannabis.

In 2017, Rasmus 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.

Rasmus Paludan has been asked several times to address the fact that he has been a lawyer for asylum seekers, while he has publicly argued against immigration.

Rasmus Paludan has rejected the criticism, explaining that his goal as a lawyer is to fight for the client and that a defence lawyer does not have to be a supporter of murder to be able to defend a person accused of manslaughter.

Rasmus Paludan has further said that he has only been a lawyer for a foreigner deprived of his liberty when that person has asked for him.

Rasmus Paludan was in three cases between 2016 and 2018 appointed as a lawyer for African asylum seekers.

In 2017, Rasmus Paludan was twice fined by the Bar Association for violating good legal practice.

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

Rasmus Paludan appealed both decisions to the district court, which upheld them in May 2019.