By Haitham Haddadin

UNITED NATIONS(Reuters) - The Arab League will press the U.N. Security Council to freeze a possible war crimes indictment of Sudan's president in order to safeguard a fragile peace process in Darfur, Qatar's prime minister said on Wednesday.

 "We will present the Security Council with our point of view as a committee very soon regarding this matter," Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani told reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. "We hope a resolution would be issued for a freeze in accordance with Article 16 and on the basis of that we will start to work into looking into the remaining issues," added the premier, who heads an Arab League ministerial committee handling the issue.

Sheikh Hamad was referring to Article 16 of the International Criminal Court's statute, which permits the Security Council to freeze ICC indictments for up to one year at a time.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has asked the court's judges to charge Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur and to issue a warrant for his arrest. The judges have yet to make a decision.

Western nations on the Security Council have not ruled out applying Article 16 but have laid down a series of conditions they do not think Sudan will accept.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy told the General Assembly on Tuesday that Paris could support freezing a possible war crimes indictment of Sudan's leader only if Khartoum radically changed its policies in its war-ravaged Darfur region.

The Qatari premier was speaking after a meeting of a committee grouping Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Syria, as well as Arab League chief Amr Moussa, which is handling the issue of the charges against the Sudanese leader. "We are coordinating with the African Union and the United Nations how to start the next steps to solve firstly the issue of the accusations against some officials in Sudan and secondly to look into solving the Darfur crisis in a manner that serves peace and security in Africa," Sheikh Hamad said.

He reiterated the Arab League's position that the issue should be resolved through diplomacy.

The League has criticized Moreno-Ocampo for seeking to arrest Bashir and called for an international summit to push the political process in Darfur, where more than a dozen rebel groups are battling the Khartoum government. "He (Moreno-Ocampo) has a specific mission and his own point of view but we think that best interest would be (served) to have peace and security in the region ... which necessitate dialogue to reach a positive outcome," Sheikh Hamad said.