BEIJING, Nov 10 (AFP) - A leading Tibetan dissident has been placed under effective house arrest, apparently as punishment for meeting a UN human rights team, according to European parliamentarians (MEPs) who visited Lhasa last week.

The MEPs were allowed a 10-minute meeting with Yulo Dawa Tsering, a 68-year-old Tibetan lama who was released two years ago after spending a total of 27 years behind bars, the London-based Tibet Information Network (TIN) said in a statement Sunday.

"He appeared to us to be under some kind of restraint ... he did not have the freedom to come or go," the statement quoted Irish MEP Bernie Malone as saying.

"They said he was on parole, but during the meeting it appeared to us that this was not parole in our sense of the word. He was not the master of his own movements," Malone said.

The report supported earlier unofficial accounts from Tibet that Tsering had been moved to accomodation in Lhasa which is guarded or regularly visited by police.

It was the first time Tsering, a former philosophy teacher at Tibet University, had been seen by foreigners since Novemebr 1994, when he gave an on-the-record statement to Abdelfattah Amor, the UN's special rapporteur on religious intolerance.

Amor had been leading an official UN mission to China and Tibet to assess Beijing's record on religious freedom.

"The case of Mr. Tsering is not one to which I am indifferent," Amor told TIN on Saturday.

"I will continue to examine questions of religious freedom wherever they arise, especially in Tibet, and I will pay very close attention to this report," he added.

Last week's meeting took place after intensive lobbying by the MEPs and amid tight security.

"They were trying to keep him from us, that's certain," Malone said.

The meeting was finally allowed on condition that no photographs were taken and the discussion which took place in front of several officials would not exceed 10 minutes.

The MEPs said Tsering looked reasonably well and quoted him as describing his present condition as "better than those who are in prison."

Tsering, formerly an abbot at Ganden Monastery, was the first Tibetan to be sentenced when the Tibetan independence movement re-emerged in 1987.

He was detained in December that year and given a 10-year sentence for having spoken about Tibetan independence at a meal with an Italian tourist six months earlier.

On November 4, 1994, three weeks before the visit by the UN human rights team, he was released on parole by the Chinese authorities, who announced that he had "admitted his guilt and shown repentance" and had "pledged to support the Chinese Communist Party afer rehabilitation in society."

Tsering had previously been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1959 -- the year of the failed uprising against China rule that resulted in the escape of the Dalai Lama into permanent exile.

Tsering was released under an amnesty 20 years later.