The new Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, Palitha T.B. Kohona, presented his credentials today to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Following are UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at the launch of the book, "United Nations International Civil Service", in New York, 11 September:

The Democracy Video Challenge, a worldwide online competition that engages people around the world in a global dialogue on democracy, will launch the six winning videos in a ceremony marking the International Day of Democracy on Tuesday, 15 September, at 11:00 a.m. in the Main Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby.

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message to the fifty-third session of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference, delivered by Sergio Duarte, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, in Vienna today, 14 September:

The success of Sierra Leone’s road towards stable democracy would depend largely on the extent to which its Government would be able to provide a “peace and democracy dividend” for all Sierra Leoneans, which would depend in turn on its ability to rally international support for its “Agenda for Change”, the head of the United Nations presence in that country told the Security Council today.

On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., speakers addressing the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City on Friday morning said a people-centred development approach was the only way to ensure global security and prevent mass-scale atrocities such as “9/11” in the future.

Following are UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s remarks at the launch of "UN Ideas That Changed the World", published by the UN Intellectual History Project, in New York today, 14 September:

Some 1,300 non-governmental organization representatives from more than 50 countries concluded the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City Friday evening with a fervent call to Governments and international organizations worldwide to strengthen their commitments to achieving a world free of nuclear weapons and to promptly start negotiating a convention prohibiting and eliminating those weapons everywhere within an agreed time-bound framework.

Kicking off the sixty-secondannual gathering of non-governmental organizations this morning, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon made a passionate call to States parties to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to negotiate in good faith a convention to rid the world of its nuclear and conventional arsenal and to civil society to pressure leaders worldwide to stem the more than $1 trillion global weapons industry.

To truly achieve complete global disarmament, the process of ridding the world of nuclear weapons must be verifiable, transparent and anchored in international law and the rule of law, Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, Vice-President of Programmes of the United States-based EastWest Institute, said as the sixty-second Annual DPI/NGO Conference continued in Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon.