Poland planning high-tech wall to curb spike in illegal migrants

POLAND plans to build a wall equipped with motion detectors on its Belarusian border in a bid to stem a “gigantic increase” in migration, which Warsaw claims is a plot to destabilise the EU.

The plans for the barrier, which will cost about £214.6million, have been outlined in legislation that will go before the Polish parliament this week.

Polish border guards said they had stopped 9,300 attempted crossings from January to September. But in the past two months alone more than 8,000 migrants had attempted to gain entry.

Last week, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, the dominant party in Poland’s coalition government, said that a new permanent barrier should replace the temporary protective measures currently in place, such as hastily erected barbed-wire fences.

Under the proposal, the public would not be allowed within 200m (218yd).

Poland has also declared a state of emergency on a strip of land adjacent to the Belarusian border and deployed hundreds of soldiers to help police.

“The draft legislation, which will now be sent to the lower house, covers building a high, solid barrier with a monitoring system and motion sensors,” said Mariusz Kaminski, Poland’s interior minister.

Mr Kaminski said the wall was necessary because “the number of attempts by illegal migrants to cross the border has not been going down, despite the fact that there are more border guards, soldiers and policemen on the border”.

Poland, along with the Baltic States, has accused Belarus of flying in migrants from the Middle East and promising them that they can get into the EU. The Belarusian authorities, according to the Poles, then take them to the border and try to push them across the frontier.

On Tuesday it was reported that the Andrzej Sados, Poland’s permanent representative to the EU, has told ambassadors that Poland was facing increasing migratory pressure, and that Belarusian forces were carrying out provocative operations, such as firing blanks over the heads of Polish border guards.