BEIJING (Reuter) - The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights accepted Friday more than one million signatures petitioning him to improve the human rights of women, but blamed inadequate funding for lack of clout.

"I have a budget of 0,000 per year. Can you imagine my work with that kind of funding?" High Commissioner Jose Ayala-Lasso told reporters at the Fourth World Conference on Women in the Chinese capital. "We need new resources, effective resources, to work for human rights."

Rights campaigners presented Ayala-Lasso with stacks of petitions they said comprised some of more than one million signatures collected worldwide for the formal launch on Friday of a Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights.

Another half-million signatures were presented to the high commission at the U.N.-sponsored World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993.

Pressing governments to halt violence against women —whether in the home or as a weapon of war — has been a central theme at the women's conference under the battle cry: "Women's rights are human rights." However, Ayala-Lasso said U.N. human rights work received only slightly more than one percent of total U.N. spending.

"This is not satisfactory and we must change that reality," he said. Ayala-Lasso said he welcomed a mock "tribunal" on U.N. accountability held at the conference's grassroots forum outside Beijing last week but said the real defendants should be member countries that failed to finance human rights work.

He pledged to demand in a report on the Beijing meeting a "complete, practical and rapid program of action" and to plead for adequate resources as requested by 1.5 million petition signers.

Petition-drive activist Charlotte Bunch of the Centre for Women's Global Leadership accused Ayala-Lasso of "buck-passing" but sympathised with him as well, calling it ridiculous that the U.N. should appoint a rights commissioner and give him a staff of only two and a paltry budget.

"I think he is correct in saying that the world cannot expect the High Commission for Human Rights to take up all these issues if no states are willing to put any resources into it," she said.

Edward Broadbent, president of the International Center for Human Rights, said the time had come to stop debating and start financing work to protect women.

"Enough has been said," Broadbent told a panel discussion. "What women want now is the implementation of what has been talked about for 20 years." Amnesty International, whose main tool is popular letter-writing campaigns to pressure governments about specific rights-abuse cases, sought on Friday to use petitions to spotlight cases of abuses against women in 11 countries.

The watchdog group, armed with 5,000 signatures collected at the grassroots women's forum that preceded the Beijing conference, petitioned the U.S. Embassy to seek clemency for 73-year-old Faye Copeland, the oldest person — man or woman —awaiting execution in the United States. The embassies of Rwanda, Brazil, South Korea and Sudan accepted similar petitions, but those of Kuwait, Bosnia, Turkey and Algeria did not.

Amnesty general secretary Pierre Sane said he still hoped for official talks with the Chinese government over human rights violations involving women and men, but all efforts at contact had met with silence.

"(We've been) more or less stonewalled but we will persevere," Sane said. "We have not finished yet. We still have a week to go."