 Mr. Chair, Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, when I became Director General in 2008, I changed the name of this intervention from a statement to a report. I tried to announce to you the concept that this is your organization, it doesn't belong to us. You elected me and the Deputy Director General, and we have selected a staff in the administration that are managing the International Organization for Migration for You. It is your organization, and I am very pleased at the way in which Member States have really taken hold of this and are putting forward their own ideas as to what this organization should be and what it should be doing. At the special Council session in June, I announced my intention to pursue three objectives in the mandate period before us between now and 2018. There are three of these, namely continuity in those things which seem to be working well for us, secondly, coherence with the other regional, national, and global actors in the field of migration, and thirdly, to change what is needed and possible. I wanted to elaborate a little more on that today and share my views and seek your own on the way forward in the five years ahead. Now since last year's Council session to 102nd, we have witnessed a very active year marked by significant highs and lows. Some of these would appear to have ushered the question of human mobility into a potential watershed period in the global debate on migration governance. This is an era in which more people are living outside their native country than at any other time in recorded history. Although migration continues to grow in importance for the governments, even though for some if not many, migration remains an intractable issue, a puzzling problem rather than a possible element of solution to their demographic and labor market concerns that affect their search for sustainable inclusive growth. Now IOM, with 97 percent of its staff in the field, remains and shall continue to be a quintessentially field organization. In this case, I share the principle of my good friend Peter Maurer, President of the ICRC, the principle of proximity. We are a proximity organization. That is, we need to be on the ground at any time to be of assistance with whatever happens or occurs, whether it be the political upheavals, whether it be the typhoon in the Philippines, or the capsized ships off the coast of Lampedusa and Malta, or persons dying in the Red Sea trying to get from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia. We need to be there if we are going to be of help. So looking at some of the highs, clearly this has been a significant year with the UN's General Assembly holding its second high-level dialogue on international migration and development. Now it is very interesting that this was only the second time that the General Assembly has ever held a formal session to deal with migration. The issue is how do we deal, how do we conjugate the paradox between national sovereignty and individual freedom, the dueling narrative between control and facilitation, and the gradual awakening of governments to the link between migration and development planning. It's been remarkable for a number of reasons, the high-level dialogue. First of all, and we'll look at this in more detail later, and there is a paper just at the entrance of the hall here on our analysis of the high-level dialogue. So you'll have that in more detail, and there will be a high-level session later this week with the Deputy Secretary General of the UN and the Special Representative, the Secretary of General for Migration, on the high-level dialogue and the way forward. But there was a remarkable degree of convergence on key issues, and we will elaborate on those. The challenge for IOM, the Global Forum, and the Global Migration Group is how do we take forward these words into an active program. We have begun, and you will see in the course of my presentation, we've already begun to implement them from an IOM point of view. The second high for us was the Diaspora Ministerial Conference held in June here in Geneva. It was quite remarkable, very well attended, 653 participants, 548 government delegates of which there were 55 ministers and senior government officials, 49 international organization representatives, and 38 from civil society. The conference and the publication of proceedings was a further contribution to the high-level dialogue. Now many participants suggested, even on the first day, that IOM should regularly hold such global conferences. We looked at a number of things, including our budget, and said, well, we can't do it every year, but maybe we could do it every other year. And so we are looking forward now, and we are interested in your views on it, to holding another global conference in 2015 in Geneva, probably, on the question of migrants and cities. How do they interact? What is the dynamic? What can we learn together to help policymakers to do better than we've done in the past in welcoming and integrating migrants who come to our shores? The third high was the post-2015 United Nations Development Agenda. We've all worked very hard to get migration inserted into the new agenda. It was absent totally from the millennium development goals, and we would like to avoid a repetition of that. So we organized with UNFBA, one of our traditional partners, the Global Thematic Consultation on Population Dynamics in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in March. We published in September a series of essays on the evidence supporting migration's relevance for the post-2015 agenda. And then the final high for us was the evolution of IOM. We began in 1951 as a committee, actually a provisional committee, that was supposed to go out of existence once the ravages of the Second World War had been addressed by moving people to safer and more secure lives abroad. And yet we've survived all of that. We've continued. We have a certain permanence now. We're moving toward universal membership with 155 and a number of other countries which did not complete the application in time, but who will be brought in at the spring session. Secondly, it's, I think, more relevant than ever before with increasing access, increasing support, and increasing respect. The first time an IOM Director General has ever been asked to speak at a meeting of the Chief Executives Board, which is the whole UN system, 40-some agency heads who come together. It's the first time that the Deputy Director General has been invited to the High-Level Committee on Management, and the first time I've been invited to address the High-Level Committee on Policy. It's also the first time this year that an IOM staff member has ever been appointed as a UN resident coordinator. So these are some of the highs of the year. Unfortunately, there are a lot of lows, perhaps the most important being the armed attack on IOM in Kabul, in which one of our staff members eventually succumbed from the injuries and burns received in that vicious attack. Highly professional, totally dedicated, extremely popular, and extremely effective, this person was an enormous loss to her family, to her friends, to all of us. And I had the great honor, along with our senior regional advisor, Mr. Ambrosi, to take part in Italy and Rome at a ceremony in which the Italian President, President Napolitano, posthumously bestowed the grand cross of honor of the Order of the Star of Italy on this person. And we were there in attendance with the family. The attack provoked injuries to several other IOM staff and the destruction of our entire compound. We lost not 24 hours in continuing our work. We're back in another compound now. Our work is continuing and actually is expanding. There's a continuing rise in anti-migrant sentiment, unfortunately. It's taking place in national laws that criminalize irregular migrants, those without proper papers. And we cannot help them once they're criminalized. They're tightening visa regimes. There are insufficient legal migration alternatives. And there are overly restrictive migration policies. When I was in Lampeduz and Malta interviewing Eritreans, Somalis, Syrians, other parts of the Middle East and Africa and other parts of the world, every person that I spoke to had lost either a spouse, a parent, or a child, in some cases all three, in those boats trying to make it across the Mediterranean. Policies clearly have to be reviewed. And we have to put the focus on saving life, the most important thing. And then one can look at the options. Because clearly some of these people are obviously have a strong case to be given asylum. Others merely want to be reunited with their family who are already living north of the Mediterranean. And others clearly are being trafficked and need to be assisted and eventually taken home. But we will not get to that point of looking at these alternatives of these mixed flows if they die at sea beforehand. Same thing dying in the desert. We've also lost many people recently. Thirdly is the whole perplexing issue of multiple complex humanitarian emergencies. Now the Secretary General has announced a World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. And I think one of the questions is going to be, how are we as organizations, as governments, how are we going to organize ourselves? How are we going to muster the political will and the resources that are going to be required if you're going to address a multiplicity of complex humanitarian emergencies at the same time? How do you continue to deal with the Syria, with the problems we had earlier in Libya, with the remains of the work to be done in Haiti after the earthquake, with what's happened with the super typhoon that I had to witness firsthand in Tacloban and Rosas and elsewhere in the Philippines? How are we going to deal with all of these at one time in a sustained manner to help these countries to move forward? It's a very, very difficult one and unfortunately, many of these disasters, the trend seems to be they're going to continue. So there's that. And having just returned from the Philippines, I'm particularly conscious of this. The other thing is the loss of life is sea. I've mentioned already the irregular migration flows and they're occurring everywhere from the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea, from Haiti across the Caribbean to Florida, from South Asia across the Indian Ocean and other seas on the way to Indonesia and Australia. These are all issues that are going to require our attention and these are some of the lows of this year that are likely to continue. There is an issue there also in terms of both these movements and the unaccompanied minors is the question of how are we going to protect particularly women and girls who are more vulnerable than anyone else along any migration route, but particularly in a time of disaster bereft of home, of belongings and money. Totally helpless. Now we just yesterday celebrated the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women. This is something that has to be taken seriously. I can tell you we're working it into all of our camp coordination and camp management strategies because this has to have our attention or worse things will continue to happen. So let me let me leave it with that simply saying that there are unprecedented phenomena occurring over the last 12 months. I've already mentioned unprecedented and partially contradicting phenomenon, numerically unprecedented numbers of people moving, multiple complex humanitarian emergencies and the countervailing of view of anti-migrant policies. So the way forward is to move back to high road policies, greater coordination with all actors and to innovate in order to accomplish orderly and safe migration. First is the continuity. Let me move quickly on this one simply to say that I'm very pleased that you have chosen three years ago to establish a budget reform working group. We'll be hearing more from the chairman and I want to thank personally Ambassador Bertrand Cromberge, our rapporteur and our new second vice chair for the good work that he has done. It's been a phenomenal a bit of work that he has put into this. You've also just agreed at the Standing Committee on Program and Finance in October to establish a working group on IMUN relations and on the 12-point strategy that you gave us several years ago. I'm very pleased with this that you're going to take this under your own ambit to look at and to explore and to tell us whether you're happy with the current state or whether you want us to do something else. My position is very clear. We're totally neutral on the question. We will be available for technical support, information, background, et cetera, but it is your committee and we will look forward to supporting it and to hearing back from you. Now this report, by the way, is going to be distributed immediately after I finish speaking here the whole report of my remarks now. Partnerships, a very important other part of our continuity, the new observers we've just welcomed, regional economic commissions where we're working across the board with these commissions around the world and civil society organizations. We're very pleased to see that we have a more expanded and regular relationship than in the past, although much remains to be done. We're still holding an annual CSO-IOM senior consultation bringing us together and we're doing the same at the regional level. Partnerships, a private sector. As you can see, there's a partial listing of the relatively new private sector partnerships. The first one has to do with establishing visa application centers, in this case with Canada, where we're establishing close to 48 visa application centers around the world to assist in processing visas, including the capturing of biometrics. Under this arrangement, we've established already more than – of vaccine more than 40 countries with all centers scheduled to be operational by the end of the year and we're expected to process more than 80,000 applicants per year with VACs located across all continents, primarily in the developing world. The Gallup World poll, we're very proud to have a new partner with Gallup. I called on the CEO in Washington not long ago. They are a major partner in the new World Migration Report of 2013. I spoke to Gallup yesterday. We will be meeting here on the 16th of December to do a briefing for donors, IOM and Gallup, as to what we see as the future, particularly in terms of joint research and publication. They have polling data that we could not normally have any access to, but they're prepared now to share it with us and we will be hearing more about this. They will also be partnering with us in the IOM World Migration Port for 2015, focused on migrants and cities, so I hope you will come to the briefing on the 16th. Partnership with the airlines. We have long-standing contracts with more than 20 airlines. We just had a briefing and reception for all of these airline representatives yesterday. We do this annually. Our $125 million a year in contracts is a small drop in the ocean of their activity, but it's an extremely important part and we tried to brief them on the humanitarian work that they were helping us to carry out. We have that partnership. Deloitte Touche Limited is another new contract, basically an initiative aiming to strengthen the management processes in things such as our cluster on camp coordination and camp management. America's Foundation, another standby partner with whom we work regularly in the field, in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and elsewhere. The Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, FICCD, a new Memorandum of Understanding has just been concluded. This will allow us to do a number of other activities, migration issues with the private sector in an important part of the world. CUNY Foundation on Logistics and Supply. We're doing now logistics and supply chain management with CUNY Foundation. We have a master's program now at the University of Lugano in partnership with CUNY who've been a good partner now for the past three or four years and finally DLA Piper which has a partnership with our legal affairs department, the largest international law firm providing pro bono council worldwide for us. So these are just a few of our new private sector partnerships. Under professionalism, I'll just show you the slide. I'm not going to go into great detail. Simply to say that I consider myself extremely blessed and fortunate to have some of the finest colleagues in the field of international public service that you could find anywhere. Wherever I go, I'm extremely proud to see the work that your IOM staff are doing. They're all very enthusiastic, very dedicated, not afraid of hardship, not concerned about danger, willing to do what it takes to get the job done. And I think you can always say you can count on them to deliver good results on time and within budget. A few administrative issues, some good news at the top of the slide. Amendments have been completed. I want to particularly congratulate and thank Switzerland and Germany, the last two ratifications that were required. And I think we should give all of ourselves a round of applause for finishing the constitution. Amendments. Thank you. Thank all of you who've ratified those. Their rears, that will be addressed later, but we're at the lowest level we've been with only 14 countries now, subject to Article 4 under the accession that has to do with the membership I've already addressed. Countability. We now have an audit and oversight advisory committee that you asked us to establish. It's working now under revised terms of reference. It's doing very well. We have a new Inspector General who is with us today, and many of you have met already. We will be doing a review of the IOM structure in the new year, and I will be able to report back to you at next year's council on the results of that review. What changes we wish to make and how well is it doing? We have an issue. Next slide. We have an issue of the middle income countries. What do we do in countries which are no longer receiving assistance because of their new status as middle income countries? There I think we have to look at more ingenious ways of getting the job done. I have a new idea also. Next slide. Sorry, one more. I didn't appear on that slide, but I want to come to it later on the property acquisition policy. The coherence, there's unusually strong convergence of views at the UN General Assembly's high-level dialogue, and there you see most of the major ones. Strong emphasis on the rights of migrants, strong emphasis on reducing the costs of migration, and I'll come to that in the third part of this presentation on the initiatives we're taking there. Ethical recruitment, another initiative we'll be taking. Public perception of migrants, and then integrating migration into development policy, which is basically about the post-2015 agenda. Next slide. So there was also strong convergence on the way forward. Interesting that the Secretary General's eight-point plan coincided very closely with the GMG six-point proposal, with civil society's eight-point proposal that our Representative Therese Am mentioned, and IOM's own six-point plan. Virtually all of them are saying the same thing, but no agreement on how we move these points forward. We're not waiting. We're looking for partners on this, but we're moving ahead on almost all of these points of convergence. I think you should be very pleased with the contribution that your organization made to the high-level dialogue. We either in partnership or alone produced five volumes as background for the high-level dialogue. You'll see them all there, and we can mention them sort of one by one, but they are there, and you will see an analysis of those books in the report when you receive it in a few minutes. So the high-level dialogue, what we did there also. We strongly supported Member State's own preparations for the high-level dialogue. We did a position paper on the high-level dialogue, which you've all received. We did some very fine five preparatory roundtables in New York, starting in June of last year and ending a year later, trying to bring the UN missions as up-to-date as you and Geneva are. We also very supported all of the regional preparatory discussions. We did high-level discussions with ECOSOC when it met here in the spring of this past year, and we funded, briefed the ECOSOC delegation, and we also briefed the missions in all of our countries where we are now located. We were very active in the high-level dialogue, and I think it has had some salutary effect on the outcome. I also want to thank the Government of Peru for convening the fourth global RCP meeting of chairs and secretaries, which was held in Lima in May of this year. We found that we were all pretty much agreed on the importance of linking migration and development and enhancing the protection of human rights of migrants. We meet every two years in a global forum like this, and we're very grateful to have had this good meeting in Lima. On the GFMD, the Global Forum on Migration and Development, we also are supporting the GFMD. We have been hosting the support unit since 2009. We are supporting the current, the future chair, ILO, and we will be working within the troika of the previous chair, our chair, and the ILO chair to help them with papers and other preparatory work on central themes. We're working very closely now with the Swedish government, which is in the chair, and will be holding the Global Forum in April. We're also collaborating on a joint approach as GMG chair with the Global Forum, which you'll hear more about when Peter Southerland joins us on Thursday. Finally, although we're short staffed everywhere, we have decided that we must move forward and try to second an IOM staff member to the Global Forum, to do the GMG. Global Migration Group, we have been in the chair since the 1st of July. On the 3rd of July, we helped steer everyone toward a decision on how the GMG is functioning by getting a one-year chair and a one-year agenda. We have tried to coordinate the GMG position on key matters on the HLD and post-2015 processes. We held a major high-level dialogue side event with the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, present for that and who made remarks at that. We're doing a special high-level segment at the council this week. We will have the Director General of ILO. We'll have the head of the European Economic Commission on Europe with us and several other members of the GMG that will be also on Thursday. I mentioned already that we've had these new breakthroughs with the UN system. I won't go into more detail on that. I mentioned already the efforts we're making in the area of gender of combating gender-based violence. I've been designated since 2011 to be the so-called champion or coordinator of all efforts within the UN system to combat sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. I always think it's important to say that I was chosen for that position, not because I succeeded, but because I failed. Because I failed when I was head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo to keep soldiers, police, and civilian members of my staff from engaging in sexual exploitation. It led us therefore very quickly to put in place a policy and to put into train teaching methods to help people to be more conscious of the problem of SEA. Moving on quickly to research. We're very happy with the publications we've been able to put out this year, 133. We've done 50 migration profiles, primarily with the financial support of the European Union. We have 10 more in progress. We put out a new volume on the post-2015 development agenda, migrant policy perspective series, and we just come out with a new book on climate change in the Axel Springer series, and we're co-chairing the data and research group for GMG. And we're doing a lot in the area of climate change. Let me move quickly to my final point on change. I think this is probably the part of my presentation that might be of the most interest to you because these are initiatives that we're hoping to take, some of which we're already taking, with your support. We will be doing policy initiatives in the months ahead, coming up with the humanitarian policy framework, with strong support from several governments, members of IOM. We'll be doing something on migration advocacy guidelines, and a paper on migration, a migrant protection policy and operational framework. What we understand on what kind of protection do we do, what do we understand under that. We'll also be doing the international conference I mentioned on migrants in cities, and we will be launching a global information campaign to try to highlight the contributions of migrants as one means of trying to counter anti-migrant sentiment. We will look to you for support on that because it will probably take more resources than we currently have, but we believe in getting started. Some other ongoing initiatives. We simply have to do something together about the cost of transferring remittances home. There's something irresponsible about having to pay 12 to 15 percent to send your money back home, to put food on the table, to educate children, to take care of the sick and elderly. It's taken too long to get to this point. We're determined to launch something this year. I've talked to the Universal Postal Union in Bern. They have some ideas. We're going to be talking to the banks. We would like all of you in your individual government consultations to see what you could do locally. We have to find a way to get those costs down, and they should go down below 5 percent, because if you have $400 billion a year going back home and you take 12 to 15 percent out of that, that is a huge loss in support for families back home. Recruitment costs. It's simply irresponsible bordering on criminal when people are sent abroad by recruitment agencies thinking they're going to one job and they go into another one. You're going in as a domestic worker and you end up in prostitution ring, or you get to a place and you find out you have to pay the first year of your salary to repay the recruitment agency. We cannot allow this anymore. So we will come up with a set of universal standards or a code of conduct. We'll need your support on it, because this will not go down easily in some countries. To basically say that we have to agree that if you're going to be a recruitment agency, you have to subscribe to a set of standards. A lot will depend on how much we can come up with a robust compliance, a monitoring and compliance mechanism. The Migration Crisis Operational Framework you know about from last year. It's gone much further this year. We've gone globally a series of training exercises and we're now trying to link it into the Migrants in Crisis Initiative that the special representative, Mr. Peter Sutherland, is engaged in. You'll hear more about that. So the other one I wanted to mention that's not on the screen is a property acquisition policy. We need to help you stretch the money that you provide the administration. We can stretch it further if we can begin to purchase property rather than leasing property. I know it can be done. We won't be able to do it everywhere. We'll be doing a survey. We know that we own a couple of buildings already and we need to go into this in order to save money for the organization. So let me finally, one final slide just to say that we may be on the cusp of real change in how people think about human mobility or we may not be. We hope we are. We need to change our way of thinking to know that large scale migration in our world of today, it is inevitable if we're going to deal with the demography of an aging industrialized world. And a youthful developing society. It's going to be necessary if we're going to fill the jobs and have the skills available for sustainable inclusive growth. And it's absolutely desirable if we manage it well with good policies. My apology for the length of my presentation. Thank you.