United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, accompanied by Madam Ban Soon-taek, arrived in Brussels, Belgium, from Dublin, Ireland, in the afternoon of Tuesday, 26 May.

The Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria met today, in Istanbul, with the President and members of the political committee of the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, with both parties agreeing on the urgency of finding a political solution to the conflict and of an immediate halt of the killing and targeting of civilians.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, accompanied by Madam Ban Soon-taek, arrived in Ireland from Viet Nam on Sunday morning, 24 May.

At its sixth formal meeting on 29 May 2015, the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1591 (2005) concerning the Sudan met with representatives to the United Nations of the Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Libya.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, accompanied by Madam Ban Soon-taek, arrived in Hanoi from Seoul on Friday, 22 May.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, accompanied by Madam Ban Soon-taek, arrived in Seoul on Monday, 18 May, where he told reporters at the airport that, during this visit, he would hold talks with President Park Geun-hye and other senior officials of the Republic of Korea on development, climate change and regional concerns.  He also said he looked forward to addressing the Asia Leadership Conference, as well as the Seoul Digital Forum.

Urging the international community to shun unmet expectations from direct Palestinian-Israeli talks over the past 20 years, the top representative of the observer State of Palestine called for the application of a “collective process”, which had shown promising results on Iran, Syria and Ukraine.

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for World Oceans Day, observed 8 June:

The International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia were downsizing as quickly as possible, top officials from those courts told the Security Council today, stressing that their impending closure and transition to a smaller successor body was an opportunity to both preserve and share lessons learned in the practice of international jurisprudence.

In light of recent allegations of sexual abuse against children in the Central African Republic by foreign troops not under the authority of the United Nations, the Secretary-General will set up an external independent review to examine the UN system's handling of these allegations.