Following are UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s remarks to the mini-summit on Somalia held in New York, 23 September:

Following are UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s remarks at the ministerial meeting of the Alliance of Civilizations Group of Friends, in New York, 24 September:

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s closing statement to the High-Level Meeting on Revitalizing the Work of the Conference on Disarmament and Taking Forward Multilateral Disarmament Negotiations, in New York, 24 September:

Emphasizing the importance of the rule of law as one of the key elements of conflict prevention, peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peacebuilding, the Security Council today pledged its commitment to upholding international law, and reaffirmed its strong opposition to exempting from punishment those responsible for committing serious violations of humanitarian and human rights norms.

Three exhibitions on the Holocaust will open to the public in the Main Gallery of the Visitors Lobby, as part of a week-long series of Holocaust remembrance activities at the United Nations. The International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust is 27 January and the theme of this year’s observance is “Children and the Holocaust”.

More than 350 New York metropolitan area high school students will gather at United Nations Headquarters on 23 January 2012 to discuss their experiences with IWitness, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute’s new online educational resource that gives teachers and students access to the video testimonies of more than 1,000 Holocaust eyewitnesses from the Institute’s archive of nearly 52,000 testimonies.

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, to be observed on 27 January:

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced today the appointment of Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, a national of Brazil, as Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, at the Assistant Secretary-General level.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Beirut on the afternoon of Friday, 13 January, after an overnight flight from New York and a transfer in Paris. The main aims of the trip were to attend a high-level United Nations meeting on Reform and Transitions to Democracy, visit staff of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and hold bilateral meetings with Lebanese leaders.