"Not one more". That was one of Angela Gui's first thoughts when she saw the news that Joakim Medin had been arrested in Turkey at the end of March, she writes.
Angela Gui's father, the Swedish-Chinese publisher Gui Minhai, has – with the exception of shorter periods – been imprisoned in China since 2015. She also draws parallels to Dawit Isaak, who has been imprisoned in Eritrea since 2001.
It is "hard not to see a pattern in Sweden's work with political prisoners", writes Angela Gui and notes that Sweden, in both Gui Minhai's and Dawit Isaak's cases, has refrained from seeking international cooperation with other democracies to put pressure on China and Eritrea.
She also refers to the investigative commission's report from 2022, which directed criticism at how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the embassies have handled the cases of Isaak and Minhai.
Angela Gui writes that she "wants to believe that this will only be a brief parenthesis for Joakim Medin and his family".
"But his deprivation of liberty raises a question: how many more will be arbitrarily imprisoned – for reporting on something, for criticizing a regime, or for simply being unlucky?"
Journalist Joakim Medin traveled to Istanbul on assignment for the newspaper Dagens ETC on March 27 to report on the widespread protests in the country since Istanbul's mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was arrested earlier in the spring.
Medin was arrested at the airport and has been indirectly accused of being a member of a terrorist organization and insulting Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He has since been transferred to the high-security prison Marmara in Silivri outside Istanbul, where many of Turkey's political prisoners are or have been held.
