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Turkey, Sweden, and Finland sign a trilateral memorandum in Madrid, Spain on June 28, 2022. Photo: NATO
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Officials from Turkey, Finland, and Sweden will convene later this month in a "follow up" meeting, the Turkish foreign minister said on Thursday, decrying that the two Nordic countries are yet to take any “concrete steps” to honor their trilateral agreement signed earlier.
Helsinki and Stockholm submitted their applications to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in May, but their bid was hindered by Ankara who accused the two countries of being a haven for groups and individuals that the Turkish state considers “terrorists.”
Turkey wants to see what steps Sweden and Finland have taken in fulfilling Ankara’s demands, Mevlut Cavusoglu said, noting that “there is no time pressure on us [Turkey]. Of course, there is [time pressure] in the fight against terrorism, but in the end, they are the countries that want to be NATO members.”
Cavusoglu said that the three countries are set to convene on August 26, as part of their trilateral memorandum’s joint mechanism.
Sweden on Thursday agreed to extradite a 35-year-old man to Turkey accused of committing several accounts of bank card fraud.
The detained man says he has been wrongfully sentenced because he converted from Islam to Christianity, refused to do military service, and has Kurdish roots, Swedish broadcaster SVT said.
The Kurdish diaspora in Sweden is large with some 100,000 Kurds living there, according to unofficial figures.
Sweden’s justice ministry told Rudaw English on Friday that the man in question was detained by Swedish forces in October of 2021 and that Turkey submitted a request for his extradition in November of the same year.
The email exchange also added that Turkey had submitted two requests for the person in question.
“The Swedish government granted the request for extradition for execution of a sentence,” but rejected another request from Turkey for “extradition to take legal proceedings.”
The extradition, referred to as “routine” by Stockholm, comes weeks after Ankara demanded that several people be extradited from the former in exchange for the NATO deal.
Turkey, Sweden, and Finland signed a trilateral memorandum in Madrid in June, under which the Nordic countries would “address” Turkey’s extradition requests and establish a legal framework for facilitating the process once Turkey has provided evidence of their “terror” background.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on June 30 said Sweden has made a “promise” to extradite “73 terrorists.”
However, SVT says the man, now to be extradited, is not among the group as "the request for extradition was received last year."
In the memorandum, Finland and Sweden confirm that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a “proscribed terrorist organization,” and will commit to preventing the activities of the PKK and “their extensions,” referring to the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and other Kurdish armed groups.
The PKK is an armed group fighting for increased Kurdish rights in Turkey since the late 1970s and has been designated as a terrorist organization by Ankara and the EU.
Updated at 12:44 pm
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