Earlier in 2015, Ban Ki-moon had made plans to visit North Korea, but Pyongyang retracted the approval for the trip at the last minute without explanation.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will visit North Korea's capital Pyongyang this week, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported on Monday, quoting a UN source, in what could be a rare diplomatic opening by the isolated state.
Ban, who is South Korean, had earlier in 2015 made plans to visit the North, but Pyongyang retracted the approval for the trip at the last minute without explanation. "It is impossible that the UN Secretary-General will not meet the leader of North Korea, a UN member state, as he visits the country," the source told Yonhap, adding that the trip would likely provide significant momentum to resolve issues on the Korean Peninsula.
The secretive North, officially named the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is under heavy UN, EU and US sanctions for its missile and nuclear tests. South Korea's foreign ministry could not immediately confirm the report. Yonhap did not have further details about the trip. The UN spokesman's office had no immediate comment.
In December 2014, the UN General Assembly urged the Security Council to consider referring the North to the International Criminal Court after a UN inquiry detailed wide-ranging abuses in the country comparable to Nazi-era atrocities. Two serving UN chiefs have visited the North previously. Kurt Waldheim visited the North Korean capital of Pyongyang in 1979 and again in 1981. Boutros Boutros-Ghali visited in 1993.
Ban served as South Korea's foreign minister from 2004 to 2006, a period of intense multinational negotiations aimed at ending the North's nuclear programme. Those talks led to a 2005 deal that later fell apart.
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