In a new blow to the EU’s cherished open-border Schengen accord, Austria announced on Friday it would erect a 3.7-kilometre metal fence along its border with Slovenia to better manage a record influx
In a new blow to the EU’s cherished open-border Schengen accord, Austria announced on Friday it would erect a 3.7-kilometre metal fence along its border with Slovenia to better manage a record influx of migrants and refugees.
The barrier, due to be completed in less than six weeks, will be the first fence between two Schengen members. Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner insisted the “fence conforms to the Schengen accord”, adding that it was part of temporary measures aimed at “channelling” the human flow.
“We are talking here about an ordered inflow and not a barrier,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann’s chief of staff, Josef Ostermayer, told reporters in Vienna.
Germany has decided to extend temporary border controls until mid-February, its interior ministry said on Friday, as Europe’s top economy faces a record migrant influx.
“Given there has been no significant change (in the flow of migrants), the border checks will be extended for three months,” the ministry said.
Berlin, which expects as many as one million people fleeing war and poverty to arrive in 2015, began to implement temporary controls on September 13.
The German police, meanwhile, said that three teenagers are being investigated on possible hate crime charges after allegedly attacking an eight-months-pregnant Somalian refugee.
The police said the 21-year-old woman was on her way back to a home for asylum-seekers in the town of Bad Belzig when she was attacked.
