by Radovan Stoklasa and Jason Hovet
KUTY, Slovakia, November 10 (Reuters) – Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger traveled to Prague on Thursday to ask his Czech counterpart, Petr Fiala, to ease border controls in place for several weeks to reduce a influx of migrants, heading for Germany and Western Europe.
The checks, carried out at entry points along the Czechoslovakian border (252 km), have disrupted road transport, often causing delays of several hours and angering Slovak truck drivers.
Slovakia claims that these controls do not respect the rules of the Schengen area, of which the two countries are part. Czech Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said on Wednesday he did not expect those checks to end immediately because of their effectiveness.
According to the European Union, the temporary Czech controls are linked to “irregular immigration and the activities of organized groups of smugglers”.
This month, the Slovak government set up a camp of 16 tents in Kuty, a border town, to manage the flow of migrants stopped by checks.
The Czech government introduced the controls on September 29 after seeing a 12-fold increase to 12,000 in the number of migrant detentions this year.
Since then, 8,840 cases of illegal migration have been detected and 2,841 people have been returned to Slovakia, Czech police said on Monday.
The vast majority of migrants were Syrians and headed mainly to Germany, authorities said. (Report Radovan Stoklasa in Kuty, Jason Hovet and Robert Muller in Prague; French version Kate Entringer)