More than 600,000 refugees have landed on Greek islands this year, and several other disused sports facilities are being used for temporary shelter.Ī few people have taken a more northerly route, flying to Russia and then cycling across the country’s border with Norway at the tiny far-north hamlet of Storskog. All available sporting venues were “absolutely necessary” to help Greek athletes prepare for the 2016 Games in Rio, the committee said.

In Greece, the national Olympic committee said it was strongly opposed to sheltering thousands of people in a former Olympic velodrome in Athens. The number of people risking the boat crossing from Turkey to Europe has not diminished even as winter sets in, and tensions about housing and protecting people from harsh weather are growing across the continent.

If Europe failed to change such policies and address bouts of xenophobia, “then the values of the European Union are destroyed in some way”, Asselborn added. “Walls, fences and barbed wire cannot be part of the European Union,” he said. As photos of the barbed wire barriers in Austria were shared on social media, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said throwing up fences was un-European. “This is not about a border barrier of several kilometres,” he said at a news conference on 28 October. He criticised neighbouring Hungary for blocking refugees with barbed wire fences and insisted Austria’s project was different and would not include the material. The Vienna-based newspaper Die Press also reported on the wire barriers.įaymann had said technical experts would determine the shape and size of the barriers. “The embankment was secured with help from rolls of barbed wire,” the Kleine Zeitung regional newspaper quoted an unnamed police spokesperson as saying.

Police at the border, who have struggled to control thousands of frustrated refugees desperate to continue onwards at a time of deepening cold, apparently overturned that decision. Plans for a series of barriers at the Spielfeld border crossing with Slovenia were announced last week and the chancellor, Werner Faymann, said they were intended to control the flow of hundreds of people crossing into the country there each day, not to stop them arriving. Austria has put up barbed wire at a border crossing with Slovenia used by hundreds of refugees and migrants, days after the the Austrian chancellor promised that new border fences would not have the deterrent.

Barbed wire fence 7 days to die