 65 is an important birthday. I enjoyed it very much, and I think we'll enjoy it now in IOM. Of the 16 countries in attendance in 1951, a decision was taken to found what was called the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe. And we need to remember, your organization was founded to help those ravaged by the Second World War to get to safe shores and new lives. We were born at the same time of our oldest traditional partner, UNHCR, and we are still working today closely together. There's been a succession of name changes over the years, followed as we expanded and we assumed a growing range of activities and services. 1952, for example, we became the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, 1980, the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration, and in 1989, finally, the International Organization for Migration. These changes reflected the organization's gradual transition over half a century from an entity focused on logistics and transport to a broad-based international migration agency. IOM has now become the recognized leading international migration agency working with governments and civil society to advance understanding of migration issues, to encourage social and economic development through migration, and to uphold the human dignity of migrants and to improve their well-being. Of lasting significance to the organization is its decision that the Member States took at the special session on 30 June that provided for IOM to become a related organization within the United Nations system. This is the first Council session since that decision. It offers me the opportunity, therefore, to renew to you my commitment to uphold the essential elements of IOM that are contained in Resolution 1309 of 24 November, that we will not become bureaucratic, slow, or normative. Organizational growth. If I were asked to describe IOM today in one word, it would be growth. We're growing in every area. We're reflecting the mega trend of migration. We've made significant headway towards strengthening the core structure. The Member State Working Group on Budget Reform has been particularly productive. Since 2013, core staffing will have increased by 53 percent, in large part through the delocalization of many headquarters positions to the Manila and Panama Administrative Centers. Total expenditures stood at 1.2 billion in 2013 and will probably top $2 billion in 2017. At that same session of the Council on 30 June of this year, the membership welcomed three new member states, China, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. And as you know, China alone has 20 percent of the world's population and is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Of course, today we're pleased to have welcomed the U.S. Member State Tonga. Under accomplishments, we have the Migration Governance Framework that was adopted in 2015 in which you welcome the MyGov and ask that it be used to guide the activities of the organization under international standards and migrants' rights. We have been organizing information sessions on international standards. We've held consultations with various governmental ministries. We've carried out an assessment of countries' adherence to these standards. We've worked with the private sector to try to help it to comply with human rights standards, especially with regard to ethical recruitment in the supply chain. We've worked with civil society organizations to work more effectively with governments in 37 countries. We helped to change migration laws through revising them in several countries, including in Timor-Leste where laws against trafficking in persons are being amended to reflect international norms. Under principles for humanitarian action, the Migration Crisis Operational Framework's strategic planning methodology was finalized in June, serves as the main vehicle to implement principles for humanitarian action. Because of protection mainstreaming, we issued a guidance note in January of this year. Practitioners in pilot countries such as Ukraine and countries involved in the Syrian response, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have been trained on the protection mainstreaming approach. Sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. We have continued our efforts in this area in the first half of 2016 in cooperation with other agencies. IOM drafted an operational toolkit designed to promote field level implementation of PSEA activities. We have drafted an Interagency Standing Committee best practice guide in this area. And as you know, I'm beginning my sixth year now as the Interagency Standing Committee champion on preventing sexual exploitation and abuse. Under research and publications, we have released 210 publications so far this year. The most recently, the most downloaded publication is our World Migration Report with 48,000 downloads. And the total number of downloads of IOM publications so far has been nearly 2 million. Between IOM and the Economist Intelligence Unit of the Economist Magazine, we have released the Migration Governance Index. It's intended to help you achieve the sustainable development goals. We've also published, and this was called attention to this morning already, the Atlas of Environmental Migration, which is the first in its field. On counter-trafficking data, we have the world's largest database on victims of human trafficking, contains data on more than 45,000 individual cases, and nearly 5,000 additional cases being added every year. We created a group to map out the processes that will allow us to become the global reference for migration data. The data cluster working group consists of a number of entities. We have the displacement tracking matrix, DTM, that is used widely throughout the UN and the NGO community to tell us who has been displaced, what's the breakdown, how many men, how many women, how many families, how many children, ages, gender, et cetera. And what their needs are, Global Migration Data Analysis Center was inaugurated in September of last year in Berlin, a strong support from the Federal Republic of Germany, and strong support from the European Union. In terms of partnerships, we used the International Dialogue on Migration, which existed since 2001. We devoted the entire workshops to an assessment of the implementation of the migration-related sustainable development goals. We also organized the sixth global meeting of chairs and secretariats of regional consultative processes on migration and included the UN's Regional Economic Commissions. World Humanitarian Summit held in Istanbul in May of this year. During the consultations, we advocated for migrants caught in crises. I want to thank the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America for the support in co-chairing and financing this initiative, MIKIC Initiative, supported the convening of six regional and four stakeholder consultations, and published the MIKIC guidelines to protect migrants in countries experiencing conflict or natural disasters. We know from our experience migrants are basically invisible in a crisis. They were invisible in Libya, and they're invisible in Syria today, so we have to do more to protect them and to give them greater visibility. Regional and inter-regional partnerships, we completed close to 50 projects in this area, and I and the Deputy Director General have been privileged to take part in virtually every one of the RCP meetings in the course of 2016. Our partnerships with UN and other inter-governmental organizations, we cooperate on a broad range of migration issues with the civil society at global, regional, national and local levels. Seventy-four percent of our offices have some partnerships with CSOs, including a thousand national and 182 international civil society organizations. To ensure continuous dialogue with civil society, we hold two annual consultations with these CSOs, and diaspora engagement, extremely important for us. We've been working with the private sector in several countries to promote migrant participation in the labor market, and we have partnerships with the private sector that now benefit some 190,000 persons in 23 countries. We still have an active partnership with the Universal Postal Union in trying to reduce the cost of remittance transfers. Under the area of socioeconomic well-being of migrants and societies, labor migration, we've continued to work at raising awareness and provide training on ethical recruitment under the umbrella of the IRS project. In terms of migrant integration, we've been helping governments to design and review projects on integration. We have scaled up our I Am a Migrant campaign on social platforms, trying to challenge anti-migrant hate speech, trying to celebrate migrants' contributions to society, and to present a more accurate story of migrants and migration. Counter trafficking. First half of 2016, 13,000 practitioners and decision-makers were trained to identify and refer victims of trafficking and forced labor. We've come out with an IOM handbook on direct assistance for victims of trafficking. It should be available in the course of the next year. Migrant help. We often forget that IOM does more than 300,000 medical assessments a year. 1,000 of our 10,000 staff are in the health area. One of the primary objectives is to improve access to health services. The 2,000 health practitioners have improved their skills through IOM. Complex emergency situations. I cannot tell you what a challenge this poses for us. We have right now eight armed conflicts from West Africa to South Asia, to the persistence of situations giving rise to their movement. Kenya has announced its intention to close refugee camps in the country and to increase levels of repatriation to Somalia. Returns of Somalia migrants from Kenya and Saudi Arabia continue. In Niger, IOM inaugurated a migrant information office in the town of Agadez on the border with Libya. Conflicts flared in South Sudan, Central Africa public. Boko Haram in Nigeria. Natural disasters in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Drought in the international state of Bolivia and the earthquake in Ecuador. Crisis preparedness. We have 21 of our offices now with stocks of non-food items in emergency prone regions. 15 offices have signed long term agreements with non-food item suppliers. Continuing to respond to emergencies as quickly and efficiently as possible. Transition and recovery, we have supported 110 community stabilization initiatives representing $486 million in active programming in the first half of this year. We supported efforts to counter violent extremism in Bosnia Herzegovina, Chad, Iraq, Kenya, Mali and Somalia through ongoing and newly launched initiatives. We continue to roll out our election support programs with funding from the European Commission and a multi-parted trust fund. Property and reparations. We are leading an interagency project to develop guidance on mainstreaming housing, land and property issues within planning and crisis contexts. And supporting reparation efforts in Bosnia Herzegovina, Colombia, Nepal, Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. We are supporting more than 30 states in carrying out resettlement, humanitarian admissions and relocation initiatives. We have moved 25,000 refugees to Canada via charter flights and medical exams over the year-end holidays 2015. Safe and regular migration, visa processing, we facilitated administrative processing of 127,000 temporary and permanent visa applicants, Canada, United Kingdom and enrolling biometrics for 51,000 visa applicants. So far, we have helped in processing 20,000 humanitarian visas and since August, 18,000 telephone calls to or from Syrian families seeking reunification, assisted voluntary return and reintegration, the first nine months of this year we have assisted more than 76,000 migrants to go home voluntarily, which is twice what we normally do in a single year, from 92 host countries to 150 countries of origin. Substance is higher than 2015. Since we began voluntary return and reintegration 35 years ago, we have returned 1.4 million migrants voluntarily. Border management. By 2016, 39 IOM offices had delivered training on immigration and border management to enhance the skills of nearly 5,445 people. Finally, as you know, we are not starting from zero. We have built up a certain amount of migration architecture or structure over the past 10 years, starting with the 2005 burn initiative, 2007 in Brussels. The Global Forum on Migration and Development was founded. It is now in its ninth iteration in Bangladesh. Two high level dialogues on international migration development in 2006 and 2013, with the third one foreseen to be held before the end of 2019. And then, of course, the 1960 September, this important special summit on refugees and migration and migrants in New York at the General Assembly. Now, in addition, we had the Disaster Risk Reduction Framework Agreement. We had the Addis Ababa Action Agenda dealing with the question of financing development. We had, of course, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, the 2030 Agenda in September, the General Assembly, and, of course, in Paris of 2015, the famous agreement on climate change. So the question that we have now is whether these constructs will bring us to a decisive moment in managing human mobility or whether we will find ourselves still unable as an international community to come to an agreement and understanding on the governance of migration. Do we have it within ourselves in the very difficult atmosphere we're working in right now to come to some kind of an understanding that will constitute a global compact of understandings and commitments? This is the question before us. The summit held in September 19 was, in many ways, unique, first high-level plenary meeting on the subject. Our technical and policy expertise was essential to framing the Secretary-General's report, but these are only the first efforts. A lot more has to be done if we're going to ensure that the global compact really reflects the realities on the ground and gives us some hope and guarantee that migration will benefit everyone. It's a state-led process. We fully respect that at the same time as we keep you informed on IOM's views on all of this. One area of particular importance is that of mixed flows. This is at the center of all these large-scale movements. There are an awful lot of people out there who do not fall under any international legal framework for protection, but who need protection and support. Human rights are portable. All people on the move are going to deserve and need that protection, and we're going to do what we can to ensure it. Let me conclude by simply saying that 2016 has been a very historic year for your organization IOM, 65th anniversary, the year in which we became a related organization within the UN system, and in the New York Declaration we've been given a mandate between now and 2018 to service the negotiations leading to this compact. Our 65 years of experience have taught us that migration is an integral and enduring part of the human landscape, and we remain positive about the future, given the strength of your support and the emboldened by the progress we've made over the past decade to go forward to reduce the human social and financial costs of migration.