By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, March 9 (Reuter) - China will be in the hot seat when the United Nations Human Rights Commission sits in Geneva this week, but it is likely to escape formal censure for the seventh consecutive year, U.N. sources and rights activists said on Sunday.

The U.N. forum, which meets annually for six weeks in the spring, will also examine alleged abuses in other countries, including Algeria, Burma, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria, Turkey and the states of ex-Yugoslavia.

The five-month civil war in eastern Zaire and a steady rise in new ethnic killings in Rwanda will also come under scrutiny.

But the independent global rights organisation Amnesty International has accused the 53-member body of losing credibility.

"The Commission is allowing states to get away with murder, torture, arbitrary detention, unfair trails and a host of other human rights violations," an Amnesty survey of the body's work timed for this year's session says.

Amnesty has called on the Commission to take action to halt "systematic violations" in five priority states: Algeria, Colombia, in Indonesia for its policies in former Portuguese East Timor, in Nigeria and Turkey.

China was singled out in the U.S. State Department's annual report on human rights for having effectively silenced public dissent in 1996 through jailings, intimidation or exile.

Despite Western criticism since the military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989, and concern over political prisoners, Beijing has consistently succeeded in having motions against it squashed by vote in the Commission.

"China has it all lined up. The West will never get enough votes," a U.N. source told Reuters.

"This annual ritual of going after China is a waste of time," one human rights activist said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen said in Beijing on Friday that any attempt to censure China was doomed to fail.

"Since the beginning of the 1990s, the United States and EU (European Union) countries have for six consecutive years tabled anti-China resolutions in Geneva, and every time they have suffered defeat," Qian said. "If they insist on doing the same this year, the outcome will be the same as in the past."

The United States, whose delegation will be headed by women's rights advocate and Democratic Party fund-raiser Nancy Rubin, has failed to lobby early enough to win passage of a motion on China, according to rights activists.

They say France is working to prevent the EU, which has circulated a draft resolution on China, from taking a more aggressive position on Beijing.

"The French are pushing a softer EU line on China. The United States has not been lobbying seriously," one said.

They predict that states of strategic and economic import to the West like Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Turkey are likely to avert formal condemnation.

"The message is trade and human rights are linked," Nicholas Howen, Amnesty's legal director, told a news briefing last week.

"We see a range of 'untouchables' countries that won't be touched even though there are severe human rights violations because of the economic and political interests of the big powers and others in the Commission," he added.

"Saudi Arabia is being protected by its security allies including the United States," Howen, who called for appointing a U.N. independent expert on the secretive kingdom, Howen said.

Turkey, despite documented torture and other abuses against Kurds, enjoys Western protection, he said. The NATO member is a "buffer state against a perceived Islamic threat," he added.

The first U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jose Ayala Lasso, will open the six-week session, days before leaving his post after three years. Critics say his approach of "quiet diplomacy" kept him from speaking out about many violations.

But Ayala Lasso returns to Ecuador to become foreign minister, proud to have put in place 250 monitors deployed in U.N. human rights field operations in 12 countries, aides say.