WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland plans to spend over 1.6 billion zlotys ($404 million) on building a wall on its border with Belarus, according to a draft bill lawmakers are due to discuss on Wednesday, in a bid to stem the flow of migrants trying to cross.
In August, Poland began building a barbed wire fence along its border with Belarus to curb the illegal border crossings despite criticism that some migrants were being treated inhumanely. The wall, which would come with a system of motion sensors and cameras, would further bolster border security.
Poland and fellow EU countries Lithuania and Latvia have reported sharp increases in migrants from countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq crossing their borders from Belarus, in what Warsaw and Brussels say is a form of hybrid warfare designed to put pressure on the EU over sanctions against Minsk.
“Despite the fact that the Polish-Belarusian section of the state border has been set up with barbed wire and a concertina-type wire fence, the number of attempts to cross the border is not decreasing, but is growing,” said the justification of the bill posted on the parliament’s website.
From the start of January till the end of September, it said, the Border Guard prevented 9,287 attempts to cross the frontier from Belarus into Poland, and of those around 8,000 took place in the last two months alone.
“Due to the fact that the situation may carry on for many months longer we need to take protective measures,” said government spokesman Piotr Muller.
The total cost of the project is 1.615 billion zlotys, of which the construction of the physical barrier will cost 1.5 billion zlotys, and the technical equipment will cost 115 million zlotys.
($1 = 3.9593 zlotys)
(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Gareth Jones)
