DILI, East Timor – President Jose Ramos-Horta, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by rebel soldiers earlier this year, has accepted the top U.N. human rights job, members of East Timor's parliament said Thursday.
U.N. officials were not immediately available to comment. But lawmaker Aderito Hugo da Costa and another legislator, who spoke off the record because a formal announcement had not yet been made, said Ramos-Horta told them last week he had "accepted the job."
Ramos-Horta, a Nobel laureate who became president of Asia's youngest democracy in May 2007, was scheduled to give a press conference later Thursday. He would replace Canadian Louise Arbour, who steps down as human rights commissioner at the end of June.
East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, has endured towering unemployment and violence since it declared independence in 2002, following decades of harsh Indonesian rule.
Dozens of people have been killed in clashes between government troops and mutinous soldiers, and tens of thousands of citizens still live in squalid tent camps after fleeing their homes.
In February, rebel soldiers shot Ramos-Horta twice, nearly killing him, and ambushed the motorcade of Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, who escaped unharmed.
Ramos-Horta's political career took off at the age of 27 when he joined a short-lived East Timorese government as external affairs minister after the half-island gained independence from Portugal, and just days before the Indonesian invasion in 1975.
He fled to New York where he became the resistance movement's permanent representative to the United Nations and its youngest diplomat in history, according to Ramos-Horta's Web site.
Fluent in five languages, he shared the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with fellow countryman Bishop Carlos Belo for leading a nonviolent struggle against the Indonesian occupation.