By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, March 7 (Reuters) - U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, who confirmed on Friday she would leave her post at the end of June, urged her successor to speak out against abuses worldwide despite political pressures.

"We have to be out there assisting those whose obligation it is to enforce these rights. This does not make the position of High Commissioner more comfortable, more sheltered from criticism -- quite the opposite," she told journalists before confirming her departure to the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council.

Arbour's office has representatives in 47 countries and deploys nearly 400 human rights monitors in U.N. peacekeeping missions in hotspots such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has to appoint Arbour's successor and the U.N. General Assembly must endorse his choice.

Arbour's forthright candour aroused criticism from around the world but she brushed this off as "inevitable".

"I tend to distinguish between criticisms that have a certain validity to them, especially those expressed in good faith, and those which often don't have much merit," she said.

"I am not leaving my job because of these pressures. On the contrary, I have to resist the temptation to stay on to face them," she told reporters.

"It is very much for personal reasons. I am not prepared to make a commitment for another four years of this work. I have a family and find myself working essentially all the time here and travelling," she said. "I'm going home, basically."

Her office is independent but works closely with the U.N. Human Rights Council, which many observers fear has become as arbitrary as the widely-discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights it replaced.

Islamic and African states, often backed by Russia, China and Cuba, have an effective built-in majority in the Council.

The United States and others say it frequently condemns Israel while ignoring abuses in countries such as Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Arbour, a former Canadian Supreme Court Justice and chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor, said it may take several years for the Council to fulfil its potential, and voiced hope the United States would stand for election to the Geneva-based watchdog that was set up in June 2006.

Arbour said its credibility would stem from its new system of examining the rights record of U.N. members. The so-called Universal Periodic Review process gets started next month and will take four years to complete.

"You can't write off the Council after two years," she said. (Additional reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Alastair Sharp)

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