Sweden – Journalisten, June 04, 2025
The Ministry for Foreign Affairs should establish a dedicated team to rescue Swedish journalists and publishers detained abroad.
In mid-May, Swedish foreign correspondent Joakim Medin was reunited with his family in Stockholm after 50 difficult days in a Turkish prison. That Joakim Medin is now home is largely thanks to Swedish publishers who forced the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to take action.
Joakim Medin is not the first Swedish journalist to be detained abroad for his journalistic work. As is well known, Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson spent 14 months in an Ethiopian prison because of their journalistic efforts. Swedish journalist Dawit Isaak has essentially been kidnapped by the despotic regime in Eritrea. For more than 23 years, he has been denied contact with his family, a trial, and a lawyer—simply because he wrote a few regime-critical articles in the newspaper Setit, of which he was a co-owner. No one knows how Dawit Isaak is doing today.
Swedish publisher and poet Gui Minhai was detained in October 2015 outside his summer home in Thailand. Chinese agents transported him overland through several countries all the way to China. Gui Minhai is imprisoned solely because he engaged in independent publishing work in Hong Kong. Just over five years ago, he was “sentenced” to ten years in prison for “providing information to a foreign power,” but no one has seen the so-called “verdict.” This August marks seven years since there was any sign of life from Gui Minhai.
In hindsight, the cases of these imprisoned Swedish journalists clearly illustrate that the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (UD) lacks both an action plan and specific expertise when innocent Swedish journalists are detained in despotic states. Had the Ministry been better prepared, Joakim Medin might not have had to spend nearly two months in a dreadful prison cell!
