*EPF203 07/02/2002
White House Report, July 2: International Criminal Court
(Bush reiterates U.S. opposition to the ICC) (640)

U.S. WILL NOT SIGN ON TO INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT, BUSH SAYS

President Bush says the United States will not sign on to the International Criminal Court (ICC) because as the nation works to build peace around the world its diplomats and soldiers could be dragged "into this court and that's very troubling," the President said.

He spoke July 2 with reporters who accompanied him as he toured a local church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to promote his domestic agenda.

Bush said the United States is working at the United Nations towards ending the stalemate over the ICC that could jeopardize the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.

"We'll try to work out the impasse, but the one thing we're not going to do is sign on to this International Criminal Court," Bush said.

"President Clinton signed this treaty, but when he signed it he said it should not be submitted to the Senate," Bush told reporters. "It therefore never has been, and I don't intend to submit it either."

The new International Criminal Court came into force on July 1, 2002.

That day, the United States said it was pulling all three U.S. military advisers out of a U.N. force in East Timor. It also used its veto power in the U.N. Security Council, blocking a resolution that would have extended the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Bosnia to the end of 2002, because of concern over the ICC, but then agreed to keep the mission alive until midnight July 3.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said on Air Force One enroute to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 2 that it was unclear whether the United States would be able to break the impasse over the ICC with its allies.

Though the dispute is jeopardizing U.S. participation in the Bosnian peacekeeping mission, Fleischer said, "The President thinks it is a vital matter of principle to protect American men and women peacekeepers. We are involved deeply, globally, and the United States has a lot at risk."

Fleischer said the question is "being discussed actively at numerous levels," at the State Department and at the United Nations.

"These are difficult talks, and it's impossible to predict what their outcome will be," he said.

President Bush, Fleischer explained, "thinks the ICC is fundamentally flawed because it puts American servicemen and women at fundamental risk of being tried by an entity that is beyond America's reach, beyond America's laws, and can subject American civilian and military to arbitrary standards of justice."

Asked to comment on skeptics who say that the United States position is a pretext to get out of a lot of far-flung peacekeeping missions, Fleischer responded:

"Absolutely not. This is on the merits of the trouble that the United States sees for men and women who serve our country abroad... This is a threat to America's involvement to be peacekeepers and to help around the world, as the President sees fit," Fleischer said.

He noted that ICC participatory nations "have negotiated their own series of immunities for their personnel. So we're not asking for anything that's very different from what they themselves are granted.

"The risk Americans face is because we are not a participating nation under the ICC. We have not gotten the same protections that these other nations have gotten," he said.

Asked why the United States does not then become a participatory nation and, therefore, get those protections, Fleischer responded:

"Because we think the ICC is fundamentally flawed. And so, too, did President Clinton when he signed it. And the point in signing it, according to President Clinton, was to negotiate changes to it. Those changes were not agreed to by the ICC. And Congress, in an overwhelming bipartisan nature, opposes United States participation."

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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