By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS, March 28 (Reuters) - Britain urged the U.N. Security Council and a Southern African summit on Wednesday to reprimand Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe over his country's deteriorating human rights and humanitarian situation.

Mugabe has long faced criticism for violently cracking down on opponents of his 27-year rule and again attracted global attention when he suppressed a March 11 rally. Scores of opponents were detained and then showed signs of being beaten.

The Security Council is due to be briefed on Thursday about the situation in Zimbabwe, where police stormed the main opposition party headquarters on Wednesday and arrested its leader Morgan Tsvangirai and other politicians.

"We believe that the United Nations and specifically this council should accelerate action on Zimbabwe to match that of the European Union and other regional organizations such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC)," Britain's U.N. Ambassador Emyr Parry Jones told the Security Council.

The European Union president Germany said it was "deeply concerned" at the arrest of opposition politicians, while the European Parliament said it was time to end the "brutality."

But South Africa's U.N. Ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, the council president for March, has said the situation in Zimbabwe is not a threat to international peace and security and therefore should not be dealt with by the Security Council.

Jones Parry said Britain welcomed plans by the 14-member Southern African Development Community to discuss Zimbabwe on Thursday at its leaders meeting in Tanzania.

"We hope that summit will send a strong message about the human rights and humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe where daily the news seems to get worse," he said.

But political analysts have said regional leaders were unlikely to condemn Mugabe publicly, although the Tanzanian summit was important in focusing world attention on Zimbabwe's escalating crisis.

Mugabe, 83, Zimbabwe's sole ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, has traded on his legacy as a leading light in Africa's anti-colonial struggle and says he is the victim of Western sabotage for his policy of seizing white-owned farms to distribute to landless blacks.

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