The UN mission in Afghanistan on Thursday welcomed the announcement of the final results of the presidential election, and stressed the importance of cooperation between the electoral institutions and candidates ahead of a run-off scheduled for next month.

Jan Kubis, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), commended all the candidates in a hard-fought but positive campaign, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said at a daily briefing held at the UN headquarters in New York.

"Afghans can justifiably be proud of their elections," the envoy said in a statement. "On election day, Afghan men and women demonstrated their desire to live in peace, dignity and prosperity. Democratic choice prevailed over violence and coercion."

With no outright winner declared by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) in the first round, Kubis called upon the candidates to display "respect for the results and statesmanship" as the process moves on to a second round run-off, the spokesman said.

Afghanistan's IEC has set June 14 as the date for the run-off poll since no candidate received the required 51 percent of the votes in the first round held on April 5.

The run-off will be held between Abdullah Abdullah, who won 45 percent of some 7 million votes, and Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, who received 31.6 percent of the votes.

UNAMA noted that the process leading up to the elections represented an improvement over past voting. It also acknowledged the efforts made by Afghanistan's two electoral institutions to increase transparency in polling, the counting of votes and the handling of complaints, according to the spokesman. Endite

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