Joakim Medin, who works for Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC, was detained at the Istanbul airport on March 27 when he flew in to cover the mass protests gripping Turkey.

A Turkish court last month handed Medin an 11-month suspended sentence on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but he remains behind bars awaiting trial on a second charge of belonging to a terrorist group.

EU lawmakers "strongly" condemned the arrest and reiterated that "freedom of the press is a fundamental right and core EU value", according to a text approved by MEPs during this week's plenary session in Strasbourg, France.

The parliament "demands his immediate and unconditional release", the amendment said.

Ankara accuses Medin of being a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a claim he has denied.

The PKK has led a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, and is blacklisted by Turkey and its Western allies as a terrorist organisation.

On Wednesday, 367 EU lawmakers voted to condemn Turkey's crackdown on protests following the March arrest of Istanbul's powerful opposition mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu.

Turkey has been a candidate country to join the EU since 1999 but its accession process has been frozen for several years, and MEPs said the process "must remain frozen".

"Membership is about democracy, and the further they push towards a full authoritarian model -- as observed recently with Ekrem Imamoglu's arrest -- the further they move away from EU membership," said the parliament's Turkey rapporteur, Nacho Sanchez Amor.