WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland will announce on Thursday that it intends to extend temporary controls on its border with Slovakia, Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said.
“Today we will announce that the temporary control will be extended until November 2…we will also inform the European Commission that we are entering the second stage and extending the temporary control,” Kaminski was quoted as saying by news agency PAP.
Temporary controls on Poland’s border with Slovakia were first introduced on October 4.
“There are good results, there are clear effects. There will be no illegal migration routes through Poland,” he said.
The move comes after Slovakia announced on Wednesday an extension of controls on its border with Hungary to November 3.
The Bratislava government installed the border controls on Oct. 5, following Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria, which had earlier tightened their own frontiers with Slovakia.
The number of migrants entering Slovakia, mostly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, has risen eleven-fold to nearly 40,000 this year, according to government data.
Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria and and Germany are part of the European Union’s Schengen open-border zone.
Last month, Germany introduced checks on borders with its peers as countries face increasing migration and the EU is carving out a new migration pact that will overhaul rules for handling irregular arrivals.
(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Deborah Kyvrikosaios)
