UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon over the weekend defended his visit to Tehran, where he attended the Non-Aligned Movement nations meeting last week. Ban said he had used the visit to push for changes in Iran, criticizing the country's stance on human rights and demanding that it be more transparent in its nuclear program. “As a secretary-general of the United Nations, I have a mandate to engage with all the member states of the United Nations,” Ban told reporters in Dubai over the weekend.

In a speech at the meeting, Ban said that “it is in Iran’s interest to take concrete steps to build international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear program. That is why I urge Iran to uphold its responsibilities as a UN member state and party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions.”