Sweden – Expressen, April 07, 2025
It has been eleven days since Joakim Medin was arrested and taken to prison in Turkey.
Angela Gui, daughter of Gui Minhai, writes about how yet another Swede has been imprisoned on political grounds.
When journalist Joakim Medin arrived in Istanbul to cover the demonstrations a week and a half ago, he was arrested and taken to prison. He is accused of insulting Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and of being a member of the PKK, which is labeled a terrorist organization. Medin is one of over a thousand people who have been deprived of their liberty in Turkey in recent weeks. At least eleven of them are journalists.
Three counters now tick away on the culture page of *Expressen* for the Swedes who have been imprisoned for things they have written or published. There, Medin appears alongside Dawit Isaak and my father, Gui Minhai, who have been imprisoned for 8597 and 3459 days, respectively. In a comment last Monday, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said that each case is unique, making it difficult to draw parallels between them. On this, she is of course right: every political prisoner becomes part of a specific geopolitical context, and it would be unproductive to assume that the Turkish regime is motivated by the same factors as those in China, Eritrea, or Iran.
Nevertheless, one of my first thoughts when I saw the news about Joakim Medin was something like “not another one.” Despite the fundamental incomparable nature of these cases, it’s hard not to see a pattern in Sweden’s handling of political prisoners. In the cases of Dawit Isaak and my father, Sweden has refrained from actively seeking international cooperation with other democracies to put pressure on Eritrea and China. In Isaak’s case, Sweden has instead made concessions to Eritrea, such as continuing to provide aid without any preconditions, something his daughter Betlehem has written about in *GP*.
In my father’s case, it wasn’t until he was arrested a second time in 2018, three years after his initial imprisonment, that the Foreign Ministry began engaging with other countries. Two years later, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Sweden still hasn’t taken any material action against China; however, China has imposed an export ban on graphite to Sweden. As for Iran, last summer, Sweden extradited the convicted war criminal Hamid Noury in exchange for Swedish nationals Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi, but fellow countryman Ahmadreza Djalali was left behind with a death sentence and few other prospects for release.
