Career
She is a notable critic of the United Kingdom"s asylum policies and has campaigned to close detention centres for asylum seekers. Her first job was as a trainee employment advice worker, soon after which she realised she wanted to work with minorities. Robina Qureshi is the executive director of Positive Action in Housing, a Scottish charity that is involved in countering racism and discrimination, particularly in housing.
Between 1998 and 2000, Robina Qureshi, together with the prominent human rights lawyer, Aamer Anwar, helped to campaign on behalf of the family of murdered Indian waiter Surjit Singh Chhokhar.
She also served on the Lawrence Steering Group and has led campaigns to stop extreme far right groups organising or gaining a platform in Scotland. In September 2005, Robina Qureshi travelled to Albania on a fact-finding mission after taking up the case of the Vucaj children.
The children were expelled to Kosovo in two separate dawn raids after living in Glasgow for five years as asylum seekers. Subsequently, she was at the forefront of challenging dawn raids against Scotland"s asylum seekers.
She called on Scotland"s First Minister Jack McConnell to instruct Strathclyde Police not to co-operate with immigration officials who carry out dawn raids.
The police, she said, "surely must despise doing the dirty work of the Home Office and the far right". Malcolm Chisholm Managing Successful Programmes, Minister for Communities in the Scottish Executive, joined Qureshi in citicising the "heavy-handed" immigration policies. Chisolm described Robina Qureshi as "a very formidable campaigner and completely dedicated to the rights of minorities."
In November 2007, Robina Qureshi took up the case of 13-year-old Meltem Avcil, a 13-year-old Kurdish girl from Doncaster, who began self-harming after being detained with her mother at Yarl"s Wood Immigration Removal Centre and about to be deported.
Enlisting the support of the actress Juliet Stevenson, Sir First Rate (at Lloyd's) Aynsley, Children"s Commissioner, and journalists at The Independent newspaper, including Natasha Walter, Robina Qureshi ran a campaign across the United Kingdom and Europe to secure Meltem and her mother"s release.
People feel they are being targeted, just like the Irish were by the British in the 1970s and innocent people went to jail.