As refugee facilities in the Czech capital have become exhausted with no sign of the exodus from the war in Ukraine slowing down, authorities in the Czech Republic opened a tented camp in Prague on Saturday.
The facility in the Czech capital’s Troja district can accommodate 150 people at present, and has been opened in an attempt to ease the crowding at the city’s main railway station.
Aid organizations have for days bemoaned the undignified conditions in which refugees find themselves as they are forced to sleep in the corridors of the station for lack of anywhere else to go.
Many members of Ukraine’s Roma population in particular are currently staying there, with photos of children forced to sleep on the floor making it into newspapers.
Prague mayor Zdeněk Hřib has issued an ultimatum to the Czech government, threatening to close down Prague’s refugee reception centre unless a plan to redistribute refugees within the Czech Republic was received by Tuesday.
In terms of population, there are four times as many Ukrainians in the capital as in some other regions of the country.
According to estimates from the country’s 14 regions, there are currently around 200 000 refugees from Ukraine in the Czech Republic, Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan told on Czech Television.
Although the Czech authorities have issued over 340,000 humanitarian visas, roughly 140 000 people are believed to have left the country mostly for Western Europe.
