The new Permanent Representative of Andorra to the United Nations, Elisenda Vives Balmaña, presented her credentials to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today.

Acknowledging the ethical imperatives for a nuclear-weapon-free world, which was a “global public good of the highest order”, a new draft resolution in the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) approved today asks the General Assembly to declare that those weapons were “inherently immoral” and that all States shared an ethical responsibility to eliminate and prohibit them.

Social protection was crucial to achieve an end to hunger, the representative of Guyana told the Second Committee (Economic and Financial) today as it met to discuss agriculture development, food security and nutrition.

States needed to develop necessary legislative and policy mechanisms in accordance with international laws to tackle challenges including foreign fighters and Nazism, the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) heard today as it began consideration of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and of the right to self-determination with a series of interactive dialogues with top officials.

Opening discussion today on the broad array of issues deliberated upon by the International Law Commission in its sixty-seventh session, the Sixth Committee (Legal) began with the first cluster of topics, debating the Commission’s approach to “Protection of the atmosphere” and its conclusions on the “Most-Favoured-Nation clause”, of which it had completed consideration.

On 2 November 2015, the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1988 (2011) approved the addition of the entry specified below to the Committee’s List (the 1988 List) of individuals and entities subject to the assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo set out in paragraph 1 of Security Council resolution 2160 (2014).

A joint opening ceremony for two photo exhibitions that mark the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations will be held in the Visitors’ Lobby at 6 p.m. on 4 November.  The shows are called “The United Nations at 70: Moments and Milestones” and “UN Headquarters: A Workshop for Peace”.

The Secretary-General supported last Friday’s Syrian peace talks in Vienna while his Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, spent the last two days in Damascus discussing with the Syrian Government the conference’s outcomes and the importance of early confidence-building steps to maintain the spirit of the talks.

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message, delivered by Yuri Fedotov, Director-General of the United Nations Office in Vienna and Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, to the sixth session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, on 2 November:

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced today the appointment of Tegegnework Gettu of Ethiopia as Under-Secretary-General and Associate Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).