Hungary works to finish border barrier

Not far from the camp at Roszke where thousands of migrants and refugees cross into the European Union every day, prisoners are working to complete a massive fence that is to seal Hungary off from Serbia by October.

More than 170,000 people have crossed into Hungary since the beginning of the year, fleeing war, discrimination and poverty in the Middle East and Africa in the hope of finding refuge in the richest countries of the European Union.

Earlier this week, Hungary’s defence minister resigned because Prime Minister Viktor Orban was dissatisfied with progress that had been made in building the 175-km (110-mile) fence.

Five days before a new law comes into affect which will allow much stricter patrolling of Hungary’s southern border, the fence is nowhere near complete, with gangs of prisoners working to assemble the 3.5-metre barrier stretching eastward from the town of Roszke to the end of the Hungarian-Serbian frontier.

For now, migrants are easily able to crawl or climb over a much lower temporary barbed-wire fence that was itself laid down in double time after a government decision in July.

The government hopes the new fence will make all but impermeable a border that, until recently, had seemed set to fade away as Cold War tensions and the refugee streams that accompanied the 1990s Balkan wars receded further into history.

Along the border near Roszke, dozens of prisoners were working on building the new, more impenetrable barrier on Wednesday (September 9), watched over by prison guards.

A policeman supervising them told Reuters the prisoners were from the high-security Csillag prison in nearby Szeged.

On Thursday (September 10), migrants made their way past the half-constructed fence, walking along a railroad track.

Hungary is legally obliged to intercept and identify each entrant, but in practice large numbers have been able to continue on to Austria and Germany, with the tacit acceptance of all three governments.