A government committee in France has recommended dissolving the Church of Scientology there, on the grounds that its activities threaten public order.

A report submitted to the prime minister, Lionel Jospin, described the church as a totalitarian sect that kept files containing personal information on its members.

It said it was an extremely dangerous organisation that violated human dignity.

A Scientology spokeswoman in France denounced the report -- calling it a slapdash job in which facts were, as she put it, pulled out of a hat. The Church of Scientology was set up in the United States in 1954 and claims eight million members world-wide, about thirty-thousand in France.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service