A UN spokesman told reporters here Tuesday night that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will not visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) next week.
"The secretary-general will not be traveling to the DPRK next week," the spokesman said in an email message to the press here. "He will be in New York most of next week and then travel to Malta for the Commonwealth Summit."
"From there, he will go directly to Paris to attend COP21," also known as the 2015 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the spokesman said.
The COP21 opens at Le Bourget, north Paris, on Nov. 30. More than 40,000 representatives from 195 countries will participate.
"The secretary-general has repeatedly said that he is willing to play any constructive role, including traveling to the DPRK, in an effort to work for peace, stability and dialogue on the Korean Peninsula," the spokesman added.
The spokesman made the statement in response to a report from the Korean Central News Agency stating that the secretary-general would be visiting the DPRK next week.
If Ban made the trip, it will be his first visit to the DPRK as the UN chief, and he would be the third UN secretary-general to visit the DPRK after Kurt Waldheim in 1979 and Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1993.
On Sunday, the spokesman said that he has "no further comment" on a report by South Korea's Yonhap news agency that the secretary-general will visit the DPRK this week.
"As for any future plans by the secretary-general to travel to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, we have no further comment at this time," the spokesman said in a separate email to the press here.
Citing an unidentified high-level UN source, Yonhap said the secretary-general would visit Pyongyang in his official capacity as secretary-general later this week. However, the report gave no precise date for the visit.
The secretary-general had been scheduled to visit the DPRK in May this year, when Pyongyang invited him to tour the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which lies just over the inter-Korean border.
