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 Schengen area had erected around 200 kilometers of barbed wire covering almost a third of the Plane covers boundary line with its neighbor.
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Dismantled “by the end of June”
“The fence has failed in its stated purpose of deterring those wishing to cross the border,” Mr Golob said during a press conference. As promised in the recent legislative campaign, it will therefore be dismantled “by the end of June, for humanitarian reasons and because it has not achieved its objective,” he added.
The number of illegal travelers has increased since the beginning of the year, the prime minister said. In addition, human rights organizations and the police have warned that many illegal immigrants are now taking more dangerous routes to enter Slovenia due to the barrier.
Mr Golob was invested on May 25, a month after a major election victory for his small liberal party called the Freedom Movement. He had been hailed for promising to restore “normalcy” and the “restoration” of democracy following the turbulent mandate of Conservative Janez Jansa.
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The latter, an ally of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, had defended the erection of this fence and other devices designed to prevent migrants from entering Slovenian soil.
The conditions in the reception centers for asylum seekers are “deplorable”, stressed his successor, Mr. Golob, who announced measures to improve and speed up the procedures for processing the files of migrants from Ukraine or their forced flight from the Mediterranean.