Péter Eckstein-Kovács

Péter Eckstein-Kovács (born July 5, 1956) is a Romanian lawyer and politician. A former member of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), he was a member of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies for Cluj County from 1990 to 1992 and a member of the Cluj-Napoca city council from 1992 to 1996. That year, he was elected to the Romanian Senate, where he served until 2008, except for a stint as Minister-Delegate for National Minorities in the Radu Vasile cabinet and a break until he was elected again in November 2000.

He and his wife have three children.

Biography

He was born to ethnic Hungarian parents in Cluj and studied law at the city's Babeş-Bolyai University from 1975 to 1980. From 1980 to 1981, he was a legal adviser in Miercurea-Ciuc, and since 1981 he has worked as a lawyer there and in Cluj-Napoca. He states that he was not a member of the Romanian Communist Party and did not collaborate with the Securitate. From that year until 1996, he was on the Cluj-Napoca city council, He was elected to the Senate again in November 2000, serving until 2008. While there, his priorities included judicial reform and fighting corruption, as well as the environment and human rights. In January 2009, President Traian Băsescu named Eckstein to the newly created post of Presidential adviser for minorities, an office the creation of which the UDMR had called for since 1990. Eckstein was the only member of his party to vote against the President's 2007 impeachment, a position he reversed some months later, during a crisis over the naming of the Justice Minister. In 2011, following the retirement of Béla Markó, he was one of three candidates who ran to become leader of the UDMR, finishing in second place with 22% of the vote and losing to Hunor Kelemen. He resigned his post of adviser that September, citing his opposition to the Roşia Montană Project, an endeavor strongly backed by Băsescu. At the 2012 local election, he ran for mayor of Cluj-Napoca, finishing third with 8.4% of the vote. He resigned from the UDMR in 2018, after the party voted for changes to the penal code proposed by the governing Social Democrats (PSD).

In the Chamber, Eckstein-Kovács was part of the Human Rights, Religious Affairs and Minorities Committee; in his first Senate term, he was on the equivalent committee in that body, as well as on the Judicial Nomination, Discipline, Immunity and Validation Committee. He also sat on that committee from 2000 to 2004 and headed it from 2004 to March 2008, He co-authored a number of legislative proposals and is a founding member of several civic associations. He headed the UDMR's liberal platform.