Turkey’s Erdoğan deploys Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership to further his oppression
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to use the carrot of NATO membership for Sweden and Finland to manipulate international law. Erdoğan has told the two Nato aspirants, who are seeking to join the alliance after witnessing the shocking Russian invasion of Ukraine, that Turkey will ratify its membership only if they agree to extradite Turkish dissidents to face trial. adjust its definitions of terrorism and allow arms exports to Turkey. Current NATO members must unanimously ratify all agreements to admit new members, and Turkey and Hungary are the only stopsthe latter has itself become more repressive and now follows Turkey’s accession to the alliance.
Erdoğan had issued a list of demands for both Sweden and Finland and on June 28 the three countries signed one memorandum of understanding which gave Turkey the assurances it sought in exchange for initial approval of the two countries’ accession to NATO, pending ratification by each member’s legislative branch. Those demands meant that Sweden and Finland lift an arms embargo against Turkey, and that they take measures against Turkish extradition requests for what the Turkish government describes as terrorists.
Turkey specifically wants the two countries to extradite or deport members or affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and members associated with The Gülen movement, a Turkish nationalist movement that advocates education and interreligious dialogue, and which the Turkish state condemns with the label “Fethullah Terror Organization (Fethullah Terür Örgütü or FETÖ).” Its leader, Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, was once allied with Erdoğan and his pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), but moved to the United States in 1999. He is now accused in Turkey of orchestrating a failed coup against Erdoğan in 2016. The US has refused Turkey’s request to extradite Gülen.
Turkey’s push for the extradition of perceived opponents is part of a pattern. Regarding Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO accession, Turkey seeks to have them extradite individuals not on the basis of international law but on the basis of a political agreement. It is important to understand who the people are that Erdoğan wants to extradite to show that this is political maneuvering. Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag reportedly told a state news agency in June that authorities would do it again request extradition from Finland of six alleged PKK members and six individuals it says are members of the Gülen movement, and requests the same from Sweden of 11 alleged PKK members and 10 people it says are Gülenists.
In the case of alleged members of the PKK, which the United States, the European Union and Turkey have designated as a terrorist organization, Reuters on October 21 cited a Oct. 6 letter from Sweden to Turkey outlines the steps it has taken towards the June 28 memorandum, including on the PKK. “Sweden’s security and counter-terrorism police, Sapo, “has stepped up its work against the PKK,” and it made “a high-level visit” to Turkey in September for meetings with Turkey’s MIT intelligence service, Reuters reports, citing the letter. . Correspondence said that Sweden would “take up” ongoing extradition requests based on Turkish intelligence, Swedish law and the European Convention on Extradition, Reuters reported.
As for members and associates of the Gülen movement, they are not considered terrorists in the West and are often granted political asylum. One of the individuals in Sweden that Erdoğan is targeting is Bulent Kenesa journalist who was sentenced in Turkey for “insulting the president” and has now become a bargaining chip for Sweden and Finland’s membership in NATO, despite the fact that all but two of the alliance’s 30 members have ratified their accession.
Extradition decision-making
The negotiations between Turkey and the two NATO aspirants have progressed haltingly. A further wrinkle is that Sweden’s and Finland’s extradition systems are a judicial process, with decisions made by their court systems based on the rule of law, rather than political calculations. Although extradition in democratic states is generally a combination of judicial and political decision-making, the political process cannot override judicial findings where there is likely to be a violation of human rights. Although all three parties are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and would therefore prevent extradition to countries where defendants are at risk of such abuse, Turkey often believes ignores international human rights law and judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In this case, however, the politicians seeking entry into NATO have made promises of extradition that will be almost impossible to fulfill. Erdoğan is not releasing what he saw on June 28 as promises to extradite, not just “take up” the cases, as the agreement reads. On October 1 he said“Until the promises made to our country are upheld, we will maintain our principled position.”
In response, Sweden said in a 7 Oct letter to Erdoğan that it “is committed to promptly and thoroughly addressing pending extradition requests for terrorist suspects.” Finland has not gone that far, and has done so refused to tip over or reassess six extradition petitions and their national courts’ extradition decisions.
Negotiations are ongoing at the highest level. On October 21, Erdoğan agreed to meet with Sweden’s new center-right Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to discuss progressand on 24 October Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Tobais Billström declared that Sweden would not tolerate the PKK. He said, “There will be no nonsense from the Swedish government when it comes to the PKK… We fully support a policy which means that terrorist organizations do not have the right to operate on Swedish territory.” However, there is no mention of the Gülen movement or of overturning previous findings on extradition or political asylum.
The current Turkish government has become known for dismissing criticism and cracking down on all opposition. This increased significantly after the failed coup in 2016, when there was great purges civil society. Long lists of thousands of people: judges, lawyers, academics, teachers and civil servants were drawn up and more than 9,000 people were imprisoned as a result of the post-coup crackdown, and thousands more lost their jobs. The charges against them have been false, meaning that these people were essentially “guilty” not of committing a crime but of reading the wrong literature, talking to the wrong people, and expressing skepticism about Erdoğan’s government. These purges take place regularly marked by human rights groups.
Freedom of expression is also a constant target of the Erdoğan regime, which recently introduced a new media law imposing stricter censorship that Erdoğan immediately ratified. More than 200 Turkish authors, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, issued one statement in opposition to the new law, which the International Organization for Freedom of Expression, Article 19 called “dangerous’ and ‘dystopian’..”
Manipulating Interpol
NATO is not the only international organization that the Turkish government has become adept at using for its own political purposes. It’s actually regular manipulation of Interpol shows the level of contempt the government has for international systems and the rule of law. Erdoğan’s regime tried to influence US President Donald Trump to extradite Gülen by enlist the help of Rudy Giuliani; fortunately, in that case, Trump did not seek to override the rule of law. But Turkey has come under fire for issuing thousands of Interpol “Diffusion” notices, which network members can upload directly to more easily circumvent the stricter rules governing the better-known “Red Notice” system.
The Turkish government’s latest attack on Interpol’s rules is that abuse its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) system. Instead of issuing a red notice that requires a full extradition request to follow, they enter a targeted individual’s passport into the SLTD database. For example, one of my Turkish clients was stopped in the Balkans and told that his passport was on the SLTD list, which would normally mean that, being a Turkish citizen, he would be deported to Turkey. Being (falsely) accused by Erdoğan’s government of being associated with Gülen, he would be immediately arrested in Turkey and likely to face a patently unfair trial and tortured. All of this would happen without the use of any non-disclosure agreement or legal protection. Fortunately, in this case we were able to use the airline rules of the specific airline to send him back to the UK
In fact, the West has often had to reject Turkey’s illegal demands. For example, the UK will hand out in ordinary criminal cases but not in cases linked to the PKK or the Gülen movement. However, that does not prevent Turkey from trying alternative means. I have recently seen cases where the UK has refused extradition for political reasons, only for Turkey to issue a new trumped-up fraud charge so they can try again. The intention is transparently political.
The fact that Turkey, in the hands of Erdoğan, remains such a major international player is a significant problem. It remains an important geopolitical ally with the US and NATO member, primarily as a buffer between Syria and the European Union but also largely as a conduit for diplomacy with Russia, as in July agreement to resume vital grain shipments from Ukraine which was halted after Russia’s full-scale February invasion.
The use of NATO membership as a bargaining chip in extradition is a high-stakes political move that shows how the Turkish government targets opponents and critics and the lengths they will go to silence dissent. But the very real threat of Russian aggression has changed the political landscape, and Erdoğan has seized on Russia’s fear of trying to use his position to secure the extradition of critics.
Of course, in diplomacy, pacts are sometimes made with unsavory allies in the interest of security. However, any future agreement for Sweden and Finland must ensure that NATO’s potential new members do not disregard the rule of law in the process of joining. Their desire for NATO membership should not come at the expense of the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms that underpin the Alliance’s real power, influence and example.