MIROSLAV Lajčák and Péter Balázs, the Slovak and Hungarian Ministers of Foreign Affairs, presented Good Neighbourhood and Understanding awards to two groups: Slovak mountain rescuers from the High Tatras; and a joint Slovak-Hungarian peacekeeping unit serving in Cyprus, the SITA newswire reported.
The two ministers met after the Visegrad Group foreign ministers’ meeting on European partnership in Budapest on March 2. Nominations for the awards could be submitted from November of last year until the end of January after which they were judged by experts of both ministries and the ministers made the final decision on the winners.
The UN peacekeepers from both countries were nominated by Slovakia’s Defence Ministry. Slovakia’s Hungarian Coalition Party (SMK) nominated the mountain rescuers who at the beginning of 2010 rescued three Hungarian mountain-climbers, one of them quite famous back in his homeland.
“We decided to opt for apolitical nominations,” Lajčák said, as quoted by SITA.
