Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner says Austria will build a fence along its border with Slovenia to slow the tide of migrants crossing into the country.
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German police lead arriving migrants to a transport facility after gathering them Wednesday at the Austrian border near Wegscheid, Germany on the same day that Austria announced plans to erect border barriers.
Slovenia, the main entry point into Austria, also said it was ready to build a fence, threatening to set off a chain reaction from other countries along the land route used by those seeking a better life in the EU.
There are normally no border controls between Germany and Austria, through which most of the migrants are coming, but to deal with the influx Germany has temporarily reinstated document checks to register newcomers as they enter.
Refuting claims that Austria risked creating human bottlenecks, Mikl-Leitner pointed the finger at Germany, saying border police there processed “too few migrants”.
In London, delivering the annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture on Tuesday night, Abbott said “no country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself”.
In September Austrian authorities sent about 2,200 soldiers to assist in introducing tougher border checks amid the growing refugee crisis.
On Wednesday, a Bavarian state lawmaker said Merkel’s decision not to apply European Union rules in her handling of the region’s migrant crisis violates German laws.
The minister also responded negatively to the low number of applications made in countries such as Croatia and Slovenia, noting that these are “safe countries”, and that while refugees have the right to asylum, they can not simply choose the most economically attractive countries.
The government, keen to show it is managing the refugee crisis, has also begun speeding up the process of deporting those back to countries considered safe, as well as halting its previous policy under which rejected asylum seekers were not deported back during the winter months. We had a boat of shore, we thought there was not so many people in there, and then we found out that many people had gone overboard, so we had a few people brought in on the dirt road which is a bit further from here.
Officials say more than 13,000 asylum seekers have so far traveled to the Scandinavian country, and estimate their numbers could reach up to 25,000 this year.
In a telephone conversation, they “agreed that fences have no place in Europe”, a statement said.
Since October 16, when the refugee flow was rerouted to Slovenia after Hungary sealed off its border with Croatia, more than 86,000 people have crossed into Slovenia.
“I would not dramatise” the issue, the source said. “There is only Slovenian police”, said Rashed, also from Syria.
“We want to be able to carry out controls on people, and for that one needs certain technical security measures”, Faymann, a Social Democrat, told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting.
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“Member states have been moving slowly at a time when they should be running”, he said.
