Szekler Council collects 1 million signatures for ethno-regions

Romania's Szekler National Council has managed to collect one million signatures by Wednesday night to support their petition aimed at ensuring European Union protection for ethnic regions across the community, the initiative's campaign chief has said. Laszlo Pesty said, however, that further signatures were needed from four other countries to meet criteria under which the European Parliament puts the petition on its agenda. Pesty also said that the drive would go on in Hungary, too, until the official deadline at midnight on Thursday because "many people may have made mistakes when signing or signed twice" and those signatures would not count. The initiative, launched on May 7 last year, aims to ensure that the EU takes into consideration ethnic characteristics of regions when distributing cohesion funds.