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Polish authorities draft law on building strong fence on Belarusian border

More than 80 kilometers of the 180-190 kilometers fence has already been built

WARSAW, October 12. /TASS/. The Polish government is drafting a special law on building a strong fence on the Belarusian border as a means of protection from illegal migration, Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on the radio on Tuesday.

"A law is in the making that will provide a legal basis for building this engineering obstacle," he said.

Blaszczak said Poland was going to use Hungary's experience of building a fence on the Serbian border. "Bearing in mind various legal aspects this is not very simple undertaking. We will learn from this. A law is being drafted," he added.

The Polish-Belarusian border is 418 kilometers long. The Polish Defense Ministry began to build a barbed wire fence 2.5 meters tall in the middle of September. More than 80 kilometers of the 180-190 kilometers fence has already been built. Blaszczak stressed that the temporary obstruction effectively hindered illegal migration, making border crossing difficult to impossible.

Since the beginning of August more than 16,000 migrants have tried to illegally cross into Poland from Belarus. Border guards have upset most of the attempts. More than 1,800 illegal migrants have been detained and 1,500 are being kept at special centers in Poland. The authorities have found out that 50 of them may pose a threat to the country because they are connected with terrorist organizations or criminal groups.

The country's authorities have blamed the situation on the Belarusian leadership, which, Poland argues, lets migrants in and then sends them across the border to Poland, Lithuania and Latvia with the aim of triggering a migration crisis in Europe. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said at the end of May that his country had served as a barrier blocking illegal migration to Lithuania, but in the context of the West's political pressure Minsk might stop to think if it should continue doing so.

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Belarus Poland Migration

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