Dr. Kamal Hossain

Kamal Hossain (born 20 April 1937) is a Bangladeshi lawyer and politician. He is head of Kamal Hossain & Associates, a law firm based in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Hossain is the founder and president of the Gano Forum political party and leader of the Jatiya Oikya Front alliance. He is widely regarded as an icon of secular democracy in South Asia. Hossain is the leader of the pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh.

Educated at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oxford, he was called to the bar of England and Wales in Lincoln's Inn in 1959. Hossain enrolled as an advocate in the High Court of East Pakistan. He worked on cases with prominent Pakistani lawyers, including Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Mahmud Ali Kasuri, early in his legal career. Hossain often worked on habeas corpus cases during the Ayub Khan regime. Between 1961 and 1968, he taught law at Dhaka University. Hossain was the legal counsel of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League during the Agartala Conspiracy Case, and was elected vice-chairman of the Pakistan Bar Council in 1970. In 1971, he was part of the League's negotiation team for the transfer of power after the 1970 general election. Hossain was imprisoned in West Pakistan with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman during the war of independence that transformed East Pakistan into Bangladesh.

He served in Bangladesh's first post-independence government from 1972 to 1975, initially as law minister and chairman of the drafting committee in the Constituent Assembly. Hossain led the process which produced the 1972 Constitution of Bangladesh. He then served as foreign minister, and led Bangladesh to join the United Nations in 1974. As energy minister, Hossain later enacted the Bangladesh Petroleum Act. He was a research fellow and visiting fellow at Oxford University during the late 1970s. In 1981, he ran as an opposition candidate for president against Abdus Sattar. Hossain fell out with Awami League president Sheikh Hasina during the 1990s, and formed the Gono Forum (People's Forum) party. Hossain has often worked with the United Nations and the Commonwealth of Nations. He was also considered as a candidate for the post of UN Secretary General.

Revered in Bangladesh as the "conscience of the nation", Hossain was compared to Adlai Stevenson by The New York Times in 1981. Hossain has been a leading lawyer in the field of human rights, energy law, corporate law and international arbitration. He served on the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal and as UN Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan. Hossain has been a member of tribunals dealing with maritime disputes between Malaysia and Singapore and Guyana and Suriname. He was a two-term member of the UN Compensation Commission. He is a former vice-president of the International Law Association, former president of the Bangladesh Supreme Court Bar Association; and chairman of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust and the South Asian Institute of Advanced Legal and Human Rights Studies (SAILS).