(Updates with details on spotlighted victims)

By Andrew Browne

HUAIROU, China, Aug 31 (Reuter) - Amnesty International held a daring demonstration on Thursday outside a session kicking off a decennial grassroots women's forum in China, displaying posters representing 12 victims of human rights abuses.

About 15 to 20 activists of the London-based human rights group took part in Amnesty's unprecedented protest on Chinese soil, holding up posters and T-shirts bearing pictures and names of the women, who included two Chinese.

Police did not try to intervene, but a Chinese woman official with a megaphone said in English: "No meeting here. Please go to Middle School Number One or the Global Tent."

Chinese authorities have designated the school parade ground as the official site for demonstrations during the Non Governmental Organisations (NGO) Forum on Women that ends on September 8.

"Amnesty International must face the issue of human rights violations against women in China," said Amnesty spokeswoman Anita Tiessen. "In China, unofficial women's groups face harassment by authorities." Among the 12 women and women's groups whose posters were displayed outside the plenary session of the world's largest women's meeting was Chinese journalist Gao Yu.

She was jailed last year for six years on charges of leaking state secrets in articles published in Hong Kong.

Gao, 51, whose reports in the independent Economics Weekly won her an international reputation in the mid-1980s, was arrested in October 1993, just two days before she was to leave China to begin a journalism fellowship in the United States. She is reported to be in poor health.

The other Chinese woman was a Tibetan nun, Phuntsog Niydrou, imprisoned in 1989, apparently for activities linked to anti-Chinese unrest after the Himalayan region's exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

She is serving a 17-year prison sentence, the longest of any female political dissident in China, for her activities and for smuggling out tapes and poems related to alleged torture in jail, Amnesty said.

The other 10 victims represented were Burma's Dr Ma Thida, all the women killed in Rwanda's genocide, 16-year-old Algerian Katia Bengana who was shot dead for refusing to wear a veil and Brazil's Edmeia Da Silza Euzebio.

Also named were Equatorial Guinea's Maria Teresa Akumu, Faye Copeland who faces the death penalty in the United States, rape victim Mirjana of Bosnia, Kuwait's Hamda Af'ad Yunis, Maria Moldovan of Romania and Turkey's Eren Keskin.

Beijing vice-mayor Zhang Baifa walked past the protesters smiling, and said only: "I'm just here to listen."

"It is a peaceful demonstration," Tiessen said. "We believe it is a kind of protest that is acceptable. It is the kind of activity you would expect at a women's conference."

The Amnesty protesters appeared soon after the plenary session got under way. The protest continued as about 1,500 of women streamed into the plenary session to hear a recorded address by Burma's Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Thousands milled outside, angry that the hall was not big enough to hold more people.

A group of five Japanese women held a protest on the designated parade ground, unfurling a banner that read: "We are against all nuclear testing."

"We want to take this opportunity of this forum to publicise our opposition to France and China's current testing of nuclear weapons," said Yoshiko Murata, 30, from the Women's Democratic Club. She said they had been nervous of arrest if they demonstrated elsewhere.

Many women signed their appeal to France and China to stop nuclear testing. "We are having a great reaction. Everyone is signing," Murata said.