Bulgaria-Turkey Border Fence Completed

The Ministry of Defense has announced the building of a fence designed to curb the influx of migrants at Bulgaria's border with Turkey has finished.

Over the next days, the Chief Directorate Border Police is take over all sections of the installation, the construction of which had been assigned to the Defense Ministry.

The thirty-kilometer-long fence erected in the stretch between the villages of Lesovo and Kraynovo, in Bulgaria's southeast, was due to be ready early this year, but suffered from a serious delay, partly for bureaucratic reasons, and construction kicked off in January.

In the first months of 2014 it was also revealed the budget put aside for the construction had been seriously written up, swelling from BGN 5.1 M to BGN 9.664 M.

The fence drew criticism from human rights organizations as well, with activists, but also UN representatives, insisting that closing the door to asylum seekers is not a way out of the situation.

Bulgaria and Greece are Turkey's immediate neighbors to the north-west and west, and migrants try to cross into their territory in order to reach EU soil.

But Bulgaria was subject to most of the aftermath of last year's abrupt escalation of the Syrian civil war and the renewed influx of migrants that followed, as Greece had already finished a border fence with Turkey the year before.