PARIS (RNS) For the second time this month, the Church of Scientology has won a battle against its dissolution in Europe, despite a stiff sentence handed down by a French court against its operations here.
In a verdict delivered Tuesday (Oct. 27), a Paris court fined the church’s Celebrity Center and its bookshop in the French capital nearly $900,000 for defrauding former members. It handed suspended prison sentences to four church leaders and fined two others.
But the court stopped short of banning the church’s operations in France, as demanded by the prosecution. A recent legal change bars courts here from dissolving organizations convicted of fraud.
Senior Scientology spokesman Eric Roux said the church would appeal the verdict, which he claimed was made under heavy media and political pressure.
“The court said Scientology should continue in France and on that point they’re very right,” Roux said. “But the other part of the ruling is unfair, because a lot of claims are not based on facts but on opinions and lies by anti-religious extremists who are making a lot of noise.”
The court’s ruling comes less than a month after the European Court of Human Rights judged illegal a government ban against the Church of Scientology in Russia. In the binding ruling, the Strasbourg-based court also awarded more than $20,000 in damages and costs to the plaintiffs in the case — two Russian Scientology branches.
Founded in the United States in 1954 by late science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, the church claims 12 million adherents worldwide, including 45,000 in France. But unlike the in U.S., where it is recognized as a religion, it is listed as a cult in France and viewed with suspicion elsewhere in Europe.
Indeed, the trial is not a first for the French branch. Scientology officials were convicted of fraud in Lyon in 1997 and in Marseille, two years later.
In the latest case, two former Scientology members claimed they had been manipulated by the church into paying steep sums for products and services in the 1990s.
Despite losing his bid to have the church dissolved, the plaintiffs’ lawyer Olivier Morice saluted the verdict as “historic.”
“The court has expressed its will that the structure of Scientology should be maintained so that in reality it can better control it,” Morice told France’s Le Monde newspaper. “It has given the judgment a national and international dimension so that possible victims can be warned of Scientology’s methods.”
The French ruling coincided with reports that Canadian-born film director Paul Haggis had cut his ties with the church because of its stance against gays and those wishing to leave the organization.