UN Watch has learned that this Wednesday, March 26, 2008, the United Nations is planning to elect Jean Ziegler--founder of the "Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize"--as one of only three Western advisory experts on the Human Rights Council. As the darling of the council's ruling Arab and Third World blocs, Ziegler's election is virtually assured. Unless.

Unless his sponsor changes course. Ziegler enjoys close ties with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, whose diplomats, according to the Human Rights Tribune, are engaged in an intense vote-trading campaign to elect Ziegler. Only the Swiss withdrawal of their nomination will prevent Ziegler from being elected...

...Jean Ziegler has a long history of supporting unsavory rulers and regimes, including some of the world's worst human rights violators. As UN hunger expert for the past 7 years, he ignored regions with the most severe food crises, and instead devoted his time to anti-Western polemics.

Who is Jean Ziegler?

• Apologist for some of the worst human rights criminals of our time.
• After Fidel Castro imprisoned 70 journalists, Ziegler proclaimed "total support for the Cuban revolution." During an official visit to the Communist island in October, Ziegler hailed the virtues of Castro regime even while he refused to meet Cuban dissidents.
• "...Ziegler went to Hanoi during the '80s, where he heaped praise upon General Vp Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh. Indeed, it would be hard to find an intellectual more stained by collaboration with evil regimes in the 20th century than Mr. Ziegler." (Jan Marejko, "Che Guevara Lives at the UN," August 2002.)
• Served Ethiopian dictator Mengistu -- who used famine as a weapon to kill thousands -- by helping draft one-party constitution.
• Abused UN food mandate. As UN special rapporteur on the right to food for the past seven years, Mr. Ziegler ignored many of the world's most starving populations, instead focusing attention on his personal political agenda. As documented in the UN Watch report "Blind to Burundi," during 2000 to 2004, Mr. Ziegler systematically failed to speak out for numerous food emergencies, in Burundi, the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone and elsewhere.
• In 2002 he praised the Zimbabwean dictator, saying, "Mugabe has history and morality with him." He paid visits to Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Kim Il-Sung in North Korea.
• In 2006, during an interview in Lebanon, Mr. Ziegler said, "I refuse to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national resistance movement. I can understand Hezbollah when they kidnap soldiers..."