UNITED NATIONS — Following yesterday’s highly publicized release of wrongfully imprisoned medical personnel, Libya is expected to be confirmed, as early as today, as the lead planner and probable next host of a U.N. conference on fighting racism.

Libya has already been designated by the Human Rights Council to plan a follow-up to a much-criticized 2001 anti-racism gathering in Durban, South Africa. A committee gathering today in Geneva to prepare the upcoming racism conference, planned for 2009, is expected to confirm Libya’s designation as its leader. In the past, the head of the preparatory committee also has hosted the conference.

Libya has been inching its way back into world recognition in recent years, after agreeing to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction program and reaching a pact that allowed suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to be tried in Scotland. Yesterday’s release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian Arab doctor — who had been accused of infecting Libyan children with the AIDS virus — was seen as part of that pattern. Their release, after eight years in prison, received much international attention: The freed prisoners were flown out of Libya accompanied by the French president’s wife, Cecilia Sarkozy, and the European Union’s external relations commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

The freeing followed weeks of secret negotiations and led to speculations about behind-the-scenes agreements in which Libya might have received diplomatic and monitory benefits. At least one Geneva diplomat wondered yesterday whether the right to host the Durban conference was part of a package of incentives offered to Libya to release the prisoners.

“Even if it was a quid pro quo, and I do not know that it is, all it proves is that Libya is trying to get back in the fold of the international community,” a European-based Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another Western diplomat, based in New York, noted that European countries remain hopeful that the anti-racism conference will take place in New York.

The original Durban conference, held days before the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, was heavily criticized. Some anti-Israeli statements led some Jewish leaders to joke that the only form of racism Durban participants were able to agree on was anti-Semitism — and they favored it.

Calling Durban “a serious breakdown in U.N. diplomacy,” the current chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, wrote in 2002 that, after a hopeful start, it had “disintegrated into an anti-American, anti-Israeli circus.”

Last year, the Human Rights Council replaced the Human Rights Commission, which had been under heavy fire even from U.N. high officials who noted, among other issues, that in 2003 the commission had chosen Libya to be its head even as the regime of Colonel Muammar Gadhafi was a widely documented violator of human rights.

By picking Libya to head the anti-racism conference, “the U.N. is dangerously on course to repeat the mistakes of the past,” the executive director of U.N. Watch, Hillel Neuer, said yesterday. Mr. Neuer’s Geneva-based organization was the first to report that the Libya-funded Gadhafi Prize was awarded in 2002 to a Frenchman, Roger Garaudy, who had been convicted as a Holocaust denier. “It is obscene that the same racist government,” Mr. Neuer said, “is now in charge of fighting racism.”