2/11/0 2:36 (New York)

BEIJING, Feb 11 (AFP) - A Chinese judge has been sacked and locked up in a mental asylum because he refuses to renounce his belief in the banned Falungong spiritual movement, a rights group said Friday.

The Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said Huang Jinchun, a civil court judge at the Beihai Intermediate People's Court in the southern Guangxi autonomous region, was picked up at his house on November 15.

The Hong Kong-based rights group said the 34-year-old judge had been detained at the Long Qianshan asylum in the city of Liuzhou, and had been prevented from seeing his family for three months.

The centre said Huang was injected with tranquilizers after he continued to practise Falungong meditation at the institution.

A statement from the centre said Long Qianshan was run like a prison, and that patients were only allowed two hours of excercise per day and received no treatment.

It said Huang had been allowed out of the institution for 10 days over the Lunar New Year holiday during which he urged his family to publicise the detention of Falungong practitioners in asylums.

The statement said Huang had insisted he was perfectly "normal".

An official at Beihai Intermediate People's Court confirmed Huang was sacked in October, saying it was "possible" he was now in detention.

Nobody was available for comment at the Long Qianshan asylum.

The centre also said 50 Falungong practitioners detained at the Zhoukoudian psychiatric hospital near Beijing had been released on January 23 after widespread publicity about their cases.

It said up to 500 Falungong practitioners were detained in a Lunar New Year clampdown following a high-profile mass protest in Beijing's Tiananmen Square last week.

Chinese authorities admit more than 35,000 members of the banned group were detained while attempting to make similar protests between July and mid-November.