Brussels, 24/07/2014 (Agence Europe) - The barbed wire fence along the Bulgarian-Turkish border was completed on Wednesday 23 July by the Bulgarian government, according to several media reports. This “separation barrier”, which seeks to prevent migrants arriving in the EU, is 30 kilometres long and 3 metres high. Construction began in November 2013, when the authorities said that they could no longer cope with the arrival of immigrants, most of whom were Syrian refugees. The fence was erected near the town of Elhovo, a few kilometres from the Turkish border. Officially, this is not about preventing asylum seekers getting into Bulgaria but of “guiding them” to border posts, according to the Bulgarian media. Since the construction of this security mechanism, the flow of immigrants has ground almost to a halt.
The NGO, Amnesty International, denounced this fence and, in a press release, deplored that this approach, based on global security, reflected the EU's migratory policies and practices, with member states spending millions on building fences and border controls. According to Amnesty, the EU allocated almost €2 billion for police protection at external borders between 2007 at 2013 but spent only €700 million on improving the situation of asylum seekers and refugees over the same period. Over the 2007-13 period, the EU had four funding instruments for asylum and immigration: the European Fund for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals (€825 million), European Fund for Refugees (€700 million), the Return Fund (€630 million) and the External Border Fund (€1.820 billion). (SP)