PARIS -- France's health minister stepped up pressure for a worldwide ban on human cloning on Thursday with a blistering attack on Italian doctor Severino Antinori who wants to produce the world's first "photocopy" babies, Reuters reported.

Bernard Kouchner, raising the stakes after an urgent Franco-German appeal to the United Nations for a global ban on cloning humans, lambasted the controversial doctor's plan to begin cloning before year-end and said he should be struck off the medical register in Italy.

"It is, very simply, morally unacceptable to create life while hijacking its very meaning," Kouchner said.

"We have to ban the photocopying of human beings now," said Kouchner, the outspoken founder of medical aid charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and a former UN administrator in Kosovo.

"The Italian medical profession would do honorably if it immediately prohibited Mr. Antinori from practicing medicine in his country," he told France's ***Le Monde*** newspaper.

France and Germany, alarmed at the prospect that Antinori or others could soon produce human clones, have jointly written UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to urge action during the coming session of the 189-nation UN General Assembly, which opens next month.

They want the assembly to set up a special committee that would draft an international treaty on the matter.

"The objective is an international and effective ban on the reproductive cloning of humans and the creation of a globally applicable ethical boundary for the relevant areas of research," a German foreign ministry spokesman said.

UN officials said a decision to add the matter to the General Assembly's agenda likely would be made on September 12.

"The secretary general is going to distribute our proposal tomorrow to all UN member nations," French UN envoy Yves Doutriaux said in New York.

If all went smoothly, the preparatory work would require two years and negotiations on a future global convention could begin in 2003, Doutriaux told Reuters.

"This is a matter that concerns the whole of humanity," French Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bernard Valero said on Wednesday. "Action has to be taken to prevent the dangers and unpredictable consequences this poses to human kind."

Paris and Berlin hope the debate will consolidate mounting concern among governments tortured by the pace at which science and genetic engineering in particular are paving the way to a "brave new world" with no controls on the risks of excess.

But while a UN debate could be launched within months, it could take years to draft a treaty that wins universal support -- far longer than Antinori intends to wait before launching his experiment.

The Italian doctor says he has up to 700 couples willing to take part in a cloning program which he could start as early as November, and he is reportedly ready to do his work on a ship in international waters if hindered by national restrictions.