On 13 October, the 192-member General Assembly acclaimed Ban as Secretary-General.
First term as Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon with the President of Russia Vladimir Putin in Moscow on 9 April 2008
Ban Ki-moon at Davos, Switzerland in the World Economic Forum.
When Ban became Secretary-General, The Economist listed the major challenges facing him in 2007: "rising nuclear demons in Iran and North Korea, a haemorrhaging wound in Darfur, unending violence in the Middle East, looming environmental disaster, escalating international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the spread of HIV/AIDS.
And then the more parochial concerns, such as the largely unfinished business of the most sweeping attempt at reform in the UN's history". Before starting, Kofi Annan shared the story that when the first
Secretary-General Trygve Lie left office, he told his successor, Dag Hammarskjà ¶ld, "You are about to take over the most impossible job on earth".
On 23 January 2007 Ban took office as the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Ban's term as Secretary-General opened with a flap. At his first encounter with the press as Secretary-General on 2 January 2007, he refused to condemn the death penalty imposed on Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi High Tribunal, remarking, "The issue of capital punishment is for each and every member State to decide".
Ban's statements contradicted long-standing United Nations opposition to the death penalty as a human-rights concern.
He quickly clarified his stance in the case of Barzan al-Tikriti and Awad al-Bandar, two top officials who were convicted of the deaths of 148 Shia Muslims in the Iraqi village of Dujail in the 1980s. In a statement through his spokesperson on 6 January, he "strongly urged the Government of Iraq to grant a stay of execution to those whose death sentences may be carried out in the near future".
On the broader issue, he told a Washington, D.C. audience on 16 January 2007 that he recognized and encouraged the "growing trend in international society, international law and domestic policies and practices to phase out eventually the death penalty".
(October 2013)
On the tenth anniversary of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's death, 15 April 2008, Ban Ki-moon appealed for the senior leaders of the regime to be brought to justice. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia-tribunal, which was established by both the United Nations and Cambodia and which became operational in 2006, is expected to continue until at least 2010.
Ban has received strong criticism from the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, which stated that the secretariat under Ban's leadership was "drifting into irrelevance".
Cabinet
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