A group of 20 high school students from Japan selected by a civic organization in Nagasaki handed over Tuesday a petition with around 195,000 signatures calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons to the secretariat of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
The number of signatures collected worldwide this year was the largest presented by the organization, exceeding the previous high in 2012 by some 40,000 and lifting the cumulative sum of collected signatures to over 1 million, the delegation said.
It was the 16th time the "messengers of peace" high school students from Japan visited the U.N. European headquarters since 1998. The students are set to fly back to Japan on Thursday after conducting a signature collection campaign in Bern.