UNITED NATIONS - UN CHIEF Ban Ki Moon on Saturday hailed US President Barack Obama's removal of a decades-old travel ban on HIV-positive visitors, and urged other countries to do the same.

'I congratulate President Obama on announcing the removal of the travel restrictions for people living with HIV from entering the United States,' Mr Ban said in a statement released by UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids. 'I urge all other countries with such restrictions to take steps to remove them at the earliest.'

Mr Obama announced his administration would overturn on Monday a controversial US policy that had been in place since 1987. The ban on foreign nationals with HIV/Aids visiting the United States will effectively be lifted early next year.

'Such restrictions, strongly opposed by UNAIDS, are discriminatory and do not protect public health,' the programme said.

Mr Ban has made the lifting of stigma and discrimination connected with Aids a personal mission, first calling on countries to lift their travel restrictions in 2008 at a UN meeting on the disease.

The travel restrictions 'should fill us all with shame,' Mr Ban told a global AIDS conference in August 2008.