A Turkish court on Wednesday gave a Swedish journalist a suspended sentence of just over 11 months for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an Agence France-Presse correspondent and his legal team said.
Although the judge ordered his release, Joakim Medin, who works for Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC, will remain in İstanbul’s Silivri Prison, where he has been held for over a month as he is facing a second charge of belonging to a terrorist organization. No date has been set for that trial.
Medin, 40, was detained on March 27 upon arrival at İstanbul Airport, where he planned to report on nationwide protests that erupted after the detention and imprisonment of İstanbul’s opposition mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a key political rival of Erdoğan.
He appeared before a judge in the capital city of Ankara via video link from the Silivri Prison.
Prosecutors accuse Medin of participating in a January 2023 protest in Stockholm by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) during which a puppet representing Erdoğan was strung up.
Dagens ETC editor-in-chief Andreas Gustavsson told AFP that the reporter was “in a pretty good condition” and “prepared for this trial.”
“He’s looking forward to telling the judge that journalistic work shouldn’t be a crime, not even in Turkey,” he said.
Many people, from teenagers to journalists and even a former Miss Turkey, have been charged with insulting the head of state.
“The offense of ‘insulting the president’ has played a role in the harassment of many local and foreign journalists and clearly disregards the precedents set out by the European Court of Human Rights,” Erol Önderoğlu of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told AFP.
“It is gravely disproportionate and arbitrary that a foreign journalist is accused of doing something in his own country that he says he didn’t participate in but only reported on,” he said.
RSF ranks Turkey 158th of 180 countries in its press freedom index.
‘This is my job’
Gustavsson said the conditions where Medin is being held were decent and that he’d been able to exercise, “to meet his lawyers, to meet with the Swedish consulate, and once a week he’s been able to have a short phone call with his wife.”
He is also facing a second charge, for which he will be tried separately, of belonging to a terrorist organization, a crime punishable by up to nine years in prison.
Medin has denied the charges, according to the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), the Turkish rights group whose lawyers are defending him.
In a statement to prosecutors ahead of Wednesday’s trial, Medin denied participating in the Stockholm protest, saying he was only reporting on it.
“I am a journalist, this is my job,” he said.
“Joakim Medin was arrested and put on trial in Turkey on charges of ‘insulting the president’ because he reported on an event he did not participate in and was simply doing journalism,” MLSA co-director Barış Altıntaş told AFP.
The other charge of “membership in a terrorist group” was based on his social media posts, news stories and books written “solely as a result of his journalistic activities,” she said.
“It’s shameful someone who is engaged in journalism should be punished in this way, but it’s not surprising when you consider the state of freedom of expression in Turkey,” she added.
Turkey was gripped by widespread street protests after the March 19 detention and subsequent arrest of İstanbul Mayor İmamoğlu, widely seen as the only politician capable of defeating Erdoğan at the ballot box.
In response police arrested nearly 2,000 people, including journalists, among them BBC correspondent Mark Lowen, who was deported for being “a threat to public order.”
AFP photographer Yasin Akgül was also arrested, charged with attending an illegal protest then released, although he and seven other journalists will be tried this year.
Relations between Turkey and Sweden soured when Ankara refused to ratify Stockholm’s bid to join NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with Erdoğan demanding a Swedish crackdown on Kurdish militants there.
It eventually relented in 2024, with the parliament greenlighting Sweden’s accession to the US-led military alliance.
