France aims to sign lucrative business deals with Libya, while Gadhafi is looking to improve his credentials as a statesman given his improved ties with the West in recent years. But his visit has sparked controversy in France.

Secretary of State for Human Rights Rama Yade, a member of the center-right government, said in a newspaper interview published on Monday that the timing of Gadhafi’s visit was particularly bad as he was arriving on World Human Rights Day.

“France is not just a trade balance,” Yade told the daily Le Parisien, adding that France should not only sign business deals with Gadhafi but also demand “guarantees” from him on human rights in his country during his five-day visit.

“Colonel Gadhafi must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet. France should not receive this kiss of death,” she said.

Gadhafi is due to attend a dinner hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday evening. Few details of his schedule have been announced, but he is due to meet Sarkozy on at least one other occasion during his five-day stay and will entertain in his Bedouin Arab tent pitched in the garden of the presidential guesthouse.

The visit would be indecent if it boiled down to signing contracts, said Yade, whose youth, gender and Senegalese origins have made her a symbol of the new generation of politicians Sarkozy says he wants to promote.

Gadhafi’s son Saif al Islam said in a newspaper interview last week that Libya would buy more than 3 billion euros ($4.37 billion) worth of Airbus planes plus a nuclear power station and was looking to acquire military hardware too.

Sarkozy made a point of inviting Gadhafi after Libya in July released six foreign medics accused of infecting children with HIV and who had been detained for years.

Gadhafi has rarely been invited to Western capitals. But ties with Tripoli have improved since it scrapped its weapons of mass destruction program in 2003 and agreed compensation for families of victims of bombings of U.S. and French airliners.

Yade’s comments, and criticism of Sarkozy’s decision not to take her on a recent visit to China, were a rare outburst from a junior minister who has kept a relatively low profile since entering government six months ago.

An IFOP poll for Paris Match magazine found that 61 percent of respondents did not approve of Gadhafi’s visit.

French Foreign Minister Kouchner said he was “resigned” to Gadhafi’s visit, adding that France had to be vigilant on rights while at the same time defending its economic interests.

“Libya has evolved. It is the Libya of tomorrow that interests us in this visit of Colonel Gadhafi’s, it is not yesterday’s Libya, of which I have forgotten neither the victims nor the zeal,” he told France Inter radio.

The opposition said Yade’s comments were clumsy and that Sarkozy was putting business deals before rights.

“Her choice of words was brutal and I would not have used them,” said Socialist deputy Pierre Moscovici on LCI television, calling her remarks “a slap in the face for Nicolas Sarkozy”.

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