PARIS, April 26 (Reuters) - French presidential candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal pledged on Thursday to push hard for the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death over a Libyan HIV epidemic.

Socialist Royal and right-winger Sarkozy have said they will broadly follow outgoing President Jacques Chirac's foreign policy, but they used separate meetings with the prisoners' relatives to say they would do more on human rights.

A Libyan court sentenced the six to death in December for infecting 426 children with HIV in the 1990s in a highly politicised trial that has hampered Libyan attempts to end decades of diplomatic isolation.

Leading scientists have repeatedly said the infections started before the medics arrived.

"The aim is to do everything to obtain their release, particularly on a European level," Royal, who will face Sarkozy in a May 6 run-off ballot for the nation's top job, told reporters after meeting the relatives.

Sarkozy was equally adamant after his meeting.

"I want France to put human rights to the service of these women's rights. We cannot leave them in this situation. We must react, we must act," he told reporters.

"If I am elected president of the republic, I will make the release of these women and this man a priority," he said.

Though Royal and Sarkozy have starkly contrasting proposals on how to overhaul the French economy and cut unemployment, their plans for French diplomacy often overlap.

The two have said they are looking to move towards U.N. Security Council sanctions against Sudan over its resistance to letting in a large number of U.N. peacekeepers to its war-torn Darfur province.

They have also strayed from Chirac's policy by opposing the end of an EU embargo on arms sales to China, imposed after the crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The two candidates do not however agree on all diplomatic issues, and have differing views on issues such as the European constitution and how to deal with Iran's nuclear programme. (Reporting by Francois Murphy, Emmanuel Jarry, Laure Bretton and Thierry Leveque in Paris and Tsvetelia Ilieva in Sofia)

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