A Swedish reporter detained in Turkey could be jailed for 12 years if convicted of insulting the country’s president and on terrorism charges, his employer said Wednesday.
Joakim Medin, a journalist for Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC, was arrested upon arriving in Turkey last month to cover nationwide protests that erupted after the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a popular opposition leader and primary challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Medin has been charged with insulting the president, a crime in Turkey that carries a three-year prison sentence, and with membership in the PKK Kurdish militant group, which Istanbul designates as a terrorist organization. The latter charge carries a nine-year prison sentence.
“I can only repeat that he is a journalist who has done journalism,” Dagens ETC Editor-in-chief Andreas Gustavsson said. “Joakim is not a criminal, definitely not some kind of terrorist.”
Gustavsson argued that Turkey was “trying to claim that all the journalistic work that Joakim Medin has produced about Turkey is terrorism.”
“This is of course an absurd accusation,” he said.
Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said earlier this month that she had raised Medin’s case with her Turkish counterpart, and called for him to be allowed to “come home.”
Relations between Sweden and Turkey have previously been rocky, with Ankara initially refusing to ratify Stockholm’s bid to join NATO over, among other things, the presence of Kurdish groups in the Nordic country.
Turkey has been criticized by human rights observers and the European Union for increasingly repressive practices, including imprisoning journalists and stifling political dissent.
Another journalist, the BBC’s Mark Lowen, was arrested and deported from Turkey last month for “being a threat to public order.”
Medin has been arrested before. In 2015 he was jailed for a week in Syria, where he was working as a journalist, before a Kurdish group reportedly negotiated his release.
His trial for insulting Erdoğan will take place on April 30.
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