Slovenia will remove the border fence with Croatia, erected during the 2015 migration crisis, Liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob announced on Wednesday June 15.
Faced with the influx of more than half a million migrants crossing the small Alpine country to reach Italy or Austria, this member of the European Union (EU) and the Schengen area had erected barbed wire on some 200 kilometres, covering almost a third of the border line with its neighbour.
Dismantled “by the end of June”
“The fence has not fulfilled its declared purpose which was to discourage those who would like to cross the border”, explained Mr. Golob during a press conference. As promised during the recent legislative campaign, it will therefore be dismantled “by the end of June”, “for humanitarian reasons and because it failed to achieve its objective”he added.
The number of illegal arrivals has increased since the beginning of the year, the Prime Minister said. In addition, human rights organizations and the police have warned that due to the presence of the barrier, many illegal immigrants now take more dangerous routes to enter Slovenia.
Mr. Golob was invested on May 25, a month after a large electoral victory for his small liberal party called Freedom Movement. He had been acclaimed on the promise to restore the “normalcy” and of ” to re-establish “ democracy, after the turbulent mandate of the conservative Janez Jansa.
The latter, an ally of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, had defended the establishment of this fence and other devices intended to prevent migrants from entering Slovenian soil.
The conditions in the reception centers for asylum seekers are “deplorable”underlined his successor, Mr. Golob, who announced measures to improve them and accelerate the procedures for processing the files of migrants from Ukraine or forced in their flight to a trying crossing of the Mediterranean Sea.