SEOUL (AFP) - DEFECTORS from communist North Korea report continuing cases of torture, beatings, forced labour and execution without trial, a South Korean state think-tank said in a report on Thursday.

The White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea also cited restrictions on freedom of travel, residence and religion.

The Korea Institute for National Unification said its report is based on the testimony of some 200 North Koreans who defected to South Korea in 2007 and 2008.

'The number of public executions in open areas is decreasing, according to testimony by North Korean defectors,' said Park Young-Ho, director of KINU's Centre for North Korean Human Rights.

'More executions are being conducted secretly than before,' Mr Park said, without giving a reason.

Kim So-Am, a co-author of the report, said the North is still inflicting capital punishment arbitrarily and outside of the judicial system. The 354-page report notes cases since 2000 where people were publicly executed for circulating foreign videotapes or DVDs.

South Korean tapes or DVDs are increasingly popular notably near the border with China despite harsh crackdowns, it said.

'Some defectors testified that the South Korean-made DVDs reached even Pyongyang and some inland regions of North Korea as well,' Mr Kim said.

Mr Kim said North Korea revised its penal code in 2004 and 2005, but 'summary trials' which usually precede public executions are still in place.

The report, citing fresh testimony from former doctors who fled South, said the North had in the past evicted the handicapped from its showpiece capital Pyongyang and forcibly sterilised some of them.

'Young (handicapped) people below 150 centimetres (five feet) in height had to register with the authorities and some females among them were sterilised,' it said, adding the practice continued until the late 1980s.

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