To Turkey – Swedish court wants to extradite PKK supporters

He was sentenced to four years and seven months in prison in Turkey in 2014 for drug-related offences. He has already admitted this and has been paroled early for good behavior. In 2018, the man finally came to Sweden from Turkey. There he was arrested again last summer at the request of the Turkish judiciary. Now the 35-year-old must be extradited to his home country.

Stand up for Kurds
The suspect is a Kurd and has campaigned for the concerns of this people. According to his own statement, he is a member of the pro-Kurdish party HDP and supports both the Kurdish militia YPG in Syria and the outlawed Kurdish workers’ party PKK. This is probably the reason for the extradition. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused the HDP of being an extension of the PKK. However, the HDP rejects this.

The court in Sweden argued, among other things, that extradition to Turkey would be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the final decision will be made by the government in Stockholm. Observers suspect that the ongoing NATO dispute between Sweden and Turkey is the background to the new decision. The Turkish government has repeatedly demanded extraditions from the Swedish government.

In May, Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO’s military alliance. While Finland has been a member since early April, Sweden has yet to receive approval from the governments of Turkey and Hungary. Erdogan accuses the Scandinavian country of taking insufficient action against “terrorist organisations”. A new Swedish-Turkish meeting is scheduled for next week. The country hopes to join the alliance before the NATO summit in Vilnius in July.