Finland says it did not discuss specific extraditions with Türkiye

Finland and Türkiye did not discuss the extradition of any specific individuals or groups of people during negotiations at the NATO summit in Madrid this week, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Friday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Thursday that Finland and Sweden must keep promises of extraditions made during the talks, or ratification of the Nordic nations' NATO memberships will not be sent to the Turkish parliament.

As a consequence of the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, Russia's neighbour Finland has rushed to apply for membership in the Western military alliance to increase its security, bringing along Sweden to ditch decades not aligning themselves militarily.

But Türkiye had opposed their NATO bids over support for PKK terrorists, as well as over arms embargoes and unfulfilled extradition requests for terrorist figures based in the two countries.

"We agreed that now we have a signed a text and everything that we have signed is in the text," Haavisto told a news conference in Helsinki, referring to a phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu on Thursday.

"We did not, in Madrid, discuss about any individuals or any listings (with Türkiye)," he said.

After four hours of talks in Madrid on Tuesday, Türkiye, Finland and Sweden signed a joint memorandum on security measures in exchange for Türkiye lifting its veto on their NATO memberships, imposed by Ankara in May due to its concerns about terrorism.

The signed memorandum did not list any individuals for extradition.

Finland and Sweden have since said they would continue to follow local and international law in their extraditions and that the process would depend on what information was received from Türkiye.