 I welcome you on behalf of our 10,000 staff scattered on all five continents around the world in about 480 places. Let me begin by expressing sincere appreciation to all the members of the IOM Council Board. Let me also say how pleased we are to welcome our newest member states, Republic of Cuba, Cook Islands, and somewhere in the course of this week, Dominica, when the paperwork is completed, as well as our new observer state, Kuwait. This brings our total number of member states to 100, with Dominica 169. When we last met here a year ago, since then, there's been a series of global developments that have accounted for the use of much of our time and energy and your resources. Let me just enumerate a few of them. We now have eight level three humanitarian emergencies, the highest emergency level of the UN, and an all-time record number. This includes IOM's role in Bangladesh in response to the Rohingya refugee crisis, a color outbreak in Yemen, and nine armed conflicts from West Africa to the Himalayas. Record-setting number of natural disasters on almost every continent, where migrants are often disproportionately affected, an upsurge in identity politics fueled by politicians who sometimes espouse fear of the other, both in dangerous migrants and denies economies and societies the contributions that migrants are there to make. Growing and intensifying anti-migrant, anti-refugee sentiments, which some are using to evoke fear of multi-ethnic societies, and some of which attempt to expel generations old ethnic groups of their own as is tragically occurring at this very moment in Myanmar. On a more promising note, IOM has been deeply immersed in an effort to support the special representative of the Secretary General for International Migration, Louise Arbour, who will be with us here in just a few minutes, if she's not here already. And as appropriate, we try to support the two co-facilitators from Mexico and Switzerland and the President of the UN General Assembly who will also be here in just a few minutes. These are consultations designed to lead to negotiations on the 1st of February on a global compact for safe, regular, and orderly migration. Our efforts are in fulfillment of the role we were given by the New York Declaration and the modalities resolution, namely to jointly service the negotiations with the UN secretariat. So in carrying out this responsibility, we've done a number of things, including providing staff to the Office of the SRSG, to the President of the General Assembly, participation in the drafting of the papers for the six informal thematic consultations, and through our network of offices around the world, we have strongly encouraged national consultations and many, many countries have done this. We've also engaged an independent full-time civil society consultant to ensure that civil society's voice is heard. We've held a global meeting here of all 21 regional consultative processes. We turned the international dialogue and migration into a discussion of the global compact, April in New York, July in Geneva, and we brought together 35 of the world's leading scholars to give us their best thinking on migration and the volume they've just published will be launched tomorrow in a side event here in the Palais. So the transition then to being a UN agency has overall gone smoothly and without much surprise. We were already largely in the UN. Any adjustments we've made have been easily offset by very positive advantages. We now have a seat at the table, a voice in the dialogue. We now have access to information and funding, which we did not have before. We are widely respected, more widely respected, more frequently cited in and by the media, and being asked to take on more and more responsibility than before joining the UN. The branding, positioning, and marketing of IOM, however, is going to be an ongoing challenge given the complexity of migrants, migration, the fact that migrants come in so many forms and given the toxic atmosphere in which we have to operate. In all of these regards, your decision as member states to keep these two member state working groups going on the UN and the other one on the budget has proved to be very prudent, and I thank you for that. It's come increasingly clear to me that IOM is coming into its own as an organization. The one characteristic that perhaps most accurately describes where IOM is today, it is that of growth, and you will see it on the charts coming up on your screen here. We've grown in every area, phenomenal growth in number of projects, number of staff, number of member states, all reflected in a global and continuing expansion. We are currently within the UN system, number five in terms of staff, number eight in terms of budget, and I think most proudly, number one in terms of feet on the ground, we have 97% of our staff in the field, not here in Geneva. We want to keep it that way. We're also very proud of our business model whereby our administrative costs always remain consistently around 3-4% of our budget, and that I think is the proper use of your hard-earned resources. Also as we grow, we are assiduously and with purpose consolidating by adding structure and architecture to IOM. For example, a quantum leap in training and career development, but still far too little. An entire series of meetings of thematic resettlement, return, media, resource, and other specialists to build communities of interest and overall esprit de corps. Regular meetings of our management and policy committees. The rotation program that I initiated in 2008 is now firmly implanted in the minds of everybody as part of one's career and working to the advantage of both organization and individual. Our biannual chief submission meeting and in the off years, the alternate years, senior management retreats are working well. We're still determined to achieve our policy objective of gender and geographic balance. We've made some progress. The trend is positive, but I must admit we're still far, far away from our goal. We'll need your help on that. And you're prodding. Keep the pressure on us. Finally, a couple of frontier issues for the future. Number one, post-global compact follow-up. What sort of mechanism will be required to ensure implementation of the shared responsibilities to which I hope that we will agree in December of 2018? How can IOM be helpful in the post-global compact period? Second area, policy. We've been producing large volumes of policy for many, many years, especially in recent times. But the stereotype of IOM is still that we are primarily an operational agency. We can act, but we can't think. It's far from the truth, but we have to continue to show that we are a policy organization. It's an outdated image. Our policy development capacity is perhaps too little known publicly. So what we have to do, in my view, is to start planting the seeds that will make it clear. We are also a policy organization. Probably starting with the establishment of a policy unit within the office of the director general that could become eventually a department for policy planning, depending on what the new administration would want. Data and trends analysis. In the same vein, IOM tends to ensure that we become and remain a major source for migration statistics and analysis thereof. The creation of our displacement tracking matrix, now used throughout the world and by many UN agencies. The establishment in 2015 of the Global Migration Data Analysis Center in Berlin with the German government's assistance. And the creation of our internal data steering group, all designed to demonstrate our policy capacity as a leading migration data source. Thank you for the technical assistance. Very good. Timely. Structural reform. It's now nearly a decade since I initiated the last structural reform upon assuming mandate in 2008. This has led to the creation of nine adequately staffed and resourced regional offices. Thematic specialist on a range of migration aspects, management and policy committees, four headquarters departments, and senior regional advisors. A review of the structure was undertaken in 2014, found to be working more or less as we thought it should be working. However, time has passed and we probably now need to review that sometime in 2018, I would say. Two more final points and I'll close. The final point is the Secretary General's reform program. As you know, he's looking at serious reforms in three areas. Peace and security, development and management. All three to one degree or another have implications for your organization. We will be following those very closely. And I have had briefings both in a two-day retreat led by the Secretary General in New York. And I've had four or five hours of briefing by the Deputy Secretary General here in Geneva. And I will continue to keep you informed about these reforms through the IOMUN working group and the implications of those reforms for our operations. One final point and I will close. The vast majority, this is the question of a renewed focus on internally displaced persons, IDPs. They're not in either compact, neither compact for refugees or migrants. They're absent and yet they are the largest group of vulnerable people that we have by far. So, for example, in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, all of which I visited recently, most of the work we're doing is with IDPs. And we are among the largest actors on internal displacement globally and one of the few with an operational footprint long before doing and well after a crisis. So much of next year will be focused on the global compacts and we will be focused on the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the guiding principles on internal displacement. So I think both served by the framework on internal displacement last June and as the only organization that I know of whose constitution actually mentions displaced persons, we expect to have a major role in this area. Thank you very much.