Minority protection initiative collects 600,000 signatures

Minority SafePack, an initiative urging European Union protection for indigenous national minorities in the bloc, has collected 600,000 signatures, the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN), the initiative's sponsor, said in Berlin. FUEN head Lorant Vince told an international press conference that FUEN aims to bring the number of signatures up to 1 million in the remaining eight weeks. They plan to campaign intensively, he said. "We are past the half-way mark but there's still a lot left to do," he said, adding that one difficulty was that not all minorities were "not as well organised organised as Transcarpathian Hungarians". Vince said the initiative presented a "unique opportunity" for ethnic minorities to step into the limelight and achieve changes in the protection of minorities at EU level "which is at the moment nonexistent", Vince said.