Sweden has rejected Turkey’s request to extradite journalist living in exile Abdullah Bozkurt, ruling that the accusations against him are not punishable under Swedish law and therefore cannot form the basis for extradition, Agence France-Presse reported.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made the issue of extraditions a key demand before agreeing to ratify Stockholm’s NATO membership in 2024, accusing Sweden of being a haven for “terrorists.”
“On November 13 of this year, the government decided to reject two extradition requests from Turkey after the Supreme Court found obstacles,” a Swedish justice ministry official told Agence France-Presse.
He was referring to Supreme Court rulings concerning Turkish citizens Bozkurt, 54, and Muharrem Özad, 36, dating from October 29 and July 3, respectively.
Ankara accused Bozkurt, a journalist, of “leading an armed terrorist organization,” “spreading propaganda for a terrorist organization,” due to his alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, “breaching confidentiality” and “revealing information of national security and political interests,” the court said in its ruling.
Turkey, meanwhile, accused Özad of being a member of an “armed terrorist organization” — the Gülen movement — because he had an account at a bank affiliated with the group, had ties to people in the movement and lived and worked in student housing that belonged to the group, according to the Supreme Court.
In both cases the Supreme Court found the men could not be extradited because the crimes of which they were accused by Turkey are not punishable by a prison sentence of more than one year in Sweden.
In Sweden the government makes the final decision on extradition requests but cannot grant a request to another state if the Supreme Court rules against it.
Turkey blocked Sweden’s bid to join NATO for 17 months.
The standoff ended when Stockholm agreed to crack down on extremist groups, lift an arms embargo dating back to Turkey’s 2019 military incursion into Syria and committed to expediently consider Turkish extradition requests.
Bozkurt was the former Ankara bureau chief of the now-defunct Today’s Zaman newspaper who has lived in exile in Sweden since fleeing Turkey after a 2016 coup attempt.
The Turkish government designates the Gülen movement, inspired by the views of the late Turkish-Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, as a terrorist organization and alleges it orchestrated a July 2016 coup attempt, a claim the movement denies.
Bozkurt, who later co-founded Nordic Research Monitoring Network (Nordic Monitor) in Stockholm in 2019 with journalist Levent Kenez, has become a central target of Turkish state media and intelligence.
His platform has published extensive documentation on President Erdoğan’s authoritarian governance and the National Intelligence Organization’s (MİT) transnational repression, including surveillance, harassment and abductions of dissidents abroad.
In public forums and private negotiations, Turkish officials have persistently sought to silence Nordic Monitor. During Sweden’s NATO accession process, Turkey reportedly demanded the platform be shut down as a condition for supporting membership.
In November 2023 then-deputy foreign minister Burak Akçapar told Turkish lawmakers that closing Nordic Monitor was actively discussed during negotiations and implied those efforts would continue even after Sweden joined the alliance.
Bozkurt’s reporting has come at a personal cost. In 2020 he was physically attacked outside his home in Stockholm. His protected residential address was later leaked to Sabah, a pro-government Turkish newspaper, along with covert photos of Kenez. Turkish media have also circulated fabricated accusations, including claims unsupported by indictments that Bozkurt was linked to the 2016 assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov.
Senior Turkish officials have ramped up threats. In 2016 government-aligned pundit Cem Küçük said on live TV that Bozkurt should be assassinated by MİT. In 2021 a top presidential advisor, Prof. Dr. Mesut Hakkı Caşın, ominously remarked on CNN Türk: “MİT will find him. Whether they feed him to the fish or the sharks, I don’t know. But traitors all meet the same end.”
Journalists associations in Sweden and Europe condemned the threats. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) called Turkey’s actions “political blackmail” aimed at silencing independent media abroad. Bozkurt and Kenez’s cases have been flagged by the Council of Europe’s platform for the protection of journalism.
Following the coup attempt, dozens of journalists fled Turkey to escape a sweeping government crackdown and went on to establish news platforms abroad, where they continue to inform both Turkish and international audiences.
