Bulgaria's ambassador to France Irina Bokova will be nominated as the country's nomination for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) director-general, the Cabinet decided at its weekly session on May 29 2008.

Bokova is Bulgaria's current permanent delegate to UNESCO. The Cabinet decided to allocate 100 000 leva for Bokova's publicity campaign and lobbying. It will include visits abroad, publications in foreign media and information materials, among others.

UNESCO's director-general, who serves as the public face of the organisation, is elected for a four-year term by the General Conference. Japan's Koichiro Matsuura is the current director-general of UNESCO. He was first elected in 1999 to a six-year term and reelected in October 2005 for four years, following a reform instituted by the 29th session of the General Conference.

Bokova will try to succeed him at the elections in 2009.

She has a long experience as a career diplomat, graduating from the prestigious Moscow State institute for international relations in 1976 and joining the Foreign Ministry's UN and disarmament department.

After the fall of communism, the left the diplomatic corps in 1992 to work in the private sector, returning in 1995 as deputy foreign minister on European integration in the Socialist government. In the last months of the Socialist government, in 1996/97, she was acting foreign minister.

In 1996, she ran for vice-president in tandem to art professor Ivan Marazov, who was the Socialist presidential candidate. In 2001 she was elected as member of Parliament from the BSP and in 2005 she was appointed as Bulgaria's ambassador to France.

Her brother Filip Bokov is one of the advisers to Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev.