Sweden’s government said Thursday that it was denying a request from Ankara for a Swedish court to interrogate a journalist facing terror charges in Turkey.
“The request is rejected because it is contrary to Swedish general legal principles to contribute to a proceeding that could restrict freedom of expression and free and independent journalism,” Caroline Opsahl, press secretary for Sweden’s Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer, told AFP in an email.
Joakim Medin, a 41-year-old reporter working for the Dagens ETC daily, was arrested in March last year when he arrived in Istanbul to cover the biggest street demonstrations Turkey had seen in over a decade.
In April, he was handed an 11-month suspended jail sentence at an Ankara court for “insulting the president” and appeared by videolink from a cell at a prison in the İstanbul region.
He temporarily remained behind bars following the trial and is still facing charges of “belonging to a terror organization.”
Medin has denied the charge that he participated in a protest by the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Stockholm in January 2023.
In May however, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced that Medin was on his way home to Sweden and thanked foreign ministry staff and Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard for having worked “intensively” behind the scenes on the case.
But Turkey has not dropped the case and, according to Opsahl, had requested that a Swedish court conduct an interrogation with Medin.
© Agence France-Presse