Joakim Medin, who was arrested at Istanbul airport when arriving in Turkey to report on the demonstrations in the country, was surprisingly released on Friday evening after 51 days of detention and has arrived safely in Sweden.
“It’s good, relatively good, very exhausted,” a happy Medin said at the airport arriving in Sweden.
“Hard work in relative silence,” Swedish Prime-Minister, Ulf Kristersson, commented in a video recording on X. He thanked the staff at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, led by the Minister, who “have worked intensively on this issue”, and his European colleagues who have been helpful in the process.
As previously reported, Medin (40) is a Swedish journalist and writer who has written among others about the Kurdish fight against IS in Syria and reported about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Sweden he has also covered protests against Turkey. He arrived in Turkey on 27 March to report on the demonstrations against President Erdogan.
The Turkish authorities accused Medin of ”insulting” President Erdogan and “membership of a terrorist organisation”. In a hearing on 30 April, Medin was sentenced to 11 months and 20 days in prison for the first charge and remained in custody due to the separate terrorism charges.
His lawyers wrote on X that despite his release, legal proceedings in Turkey are expected to continue and that the first hearing in the terrorism-related case is scheduled for Sept. 25, 2025.
”My guess was that Joakim would be released and either sentenced in his absence or sentenced and then deported,” commented Paul Levin, director of The Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, in an interview in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. He says that Joakim and other journalists should continue to be cautious.
“I would advise him not to travel to Turkey. This whole case raises questions for people, including myself, about how safe it is to travel to Turkey. I have also written a lot about the PKK and commented on terrorism issues, and so have journalists. Consciously or not, it sends a kind of signal to foreign observers.”
Natan Shachar, a journalist in Dagens Nyheter, wrote that the Turkish President Erdogan had made a big mistake when arresting the Swedish journalist. His tough measures did not silence critics or end the crisis, but created a far greater economic and political crisis in Turkey. He had to put an end to it in order not to damage his international image as a peace mediator.
