Ban Ki-moon will be the first-ever United Nations secretary-general to visit Auschwitz next week, according to UN spokesperson Martin Nesirsky.

In a statement released yesterday, it was announced that Mr Ban would fly to Krakow, Poland next Monday, following visits to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

After visiting the Nazi death camp, he will then travel to Warsaw, where he is due to attend a UN conference on climate change.

Mr Nesirsky said the secretary-general wanted to visit the camp “to pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and to stress the importance of the UN’s work on genocide prevention, tolerance and peace”.

Mr Ban told Israeli students last August that, “because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel has been weighed down by criticism and suffered from bias and sometimes even discrimination” in the UN.

He later backtracked his comments, denying there was any discrimination against Israel inside the UN.