DAVOS, Switzerland (via PLDT) -- President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has appointed a former Supreme Court associate justice, who led a government investigation into the wave of political killings, as the new chairman of the embattled Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Former associate justice Jose Melo will take over the post vacated by former Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos, who resigned in late 2007 amid allegations he lobbied for China's ZTE Corp. to bag the multi-million-dollar National Broadband Network (NBN) project.

Abalos' term should have ended only next month. Commissioner Resureccion Borra is serving out his term in an acting capacity.

"You see how credible he was with the Melo report. All, even the UN [United Nations], they all took off from his own report," Arroyo told reporters here, after her attendance in the World Economic Forum (WEF) late Friday evening (early Saturday morning in Manila).

Arroyo said she would take her time filling out the other vacancies in the poll body, which is still short of one commissioner. There will be two more vacancies when Commissioners Borra and Florentino Tuason retire, also in February.

"There's no hurry, we'll continue to conduct the search, no hurry," she said.

The Melo Commission tagged security forces in the wave of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances that targeted mostly left-wing activists and journalists.

Investigations by United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston and the New York-based watchdog group Human Rights Watch affirmed the Melo body's findings.

The bribery scandal that allegedly involved Abalos dealt another blow to the poll body, which was accused of fraud in the 2007 mid-term and 2004 presidential elections, wherein Arroyo won a fresh six-year term.