Sweden’s foreign minister met with her Turkish counterpart on Thursday to ask for the release of a Swedish journalist convicted in Turkey of insulting the country’s president, the Swedish foreign ministry said, Agence France-Presse reported.
The meeting was held on the sidelines of an informal meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers in Warsaw, the ministry told Agence France-Presse.
“I met with the Turkish foreign minister [Hakan Fidan], we talked about [journalist] Joakim Medin, and I clearly said that I wanted him to return home soon,” Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told the Expressen daily.
Medin, who works for Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC, was detained at İstanbul Airport on March 27 when he flew in to cover the mass protests gripping Turkey.
A Turkish court last month handed down an 11-month suspended sentence to the 40-year-old journalist on conviction of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Prosecutors say Medin attended a protest in Stockholm in January 2023 where protesters strung up an effigy of Erdogan, though Medin argued that he was not even in Sweden at the time of the rally.
The judge ordered that Medin be released, but he remains behind bars awaiting trial on a second charge of belonging to a terrorist group.
Ankara accuses Medin of membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a claim he has denied.
The PKK has led a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, and is designated by Turkey and its Western allies as a terrorist organization.
