China has told Sri Lanka that it should "make efforts to protect and promote human rights", during a media briefing earlier today, PTI reports.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Qin Gang was responding to a question on the Commonwealth summit, human rights and British Premier David Cameron’s pledge to push for an international investigation through the UN Human Rights Council, if Sri Lanka doesn’t complete an independent, credible inquiry by March.

"Due to the differences in the economic and social development of different countries, there could be differences on human rights protection," Qin said.

The average occupancy rates of the hotels in Colombo remained far below expectations during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), the Daily Mirror reports.

A number of star-class city hotels including Taj Samudra, Cinnamon Grand and several other relatively small hotels carried out expensive refurbishments targeting CHOGM 2013.

Welcoming British Premier David Cameron’s ultimatum to Sri Lanka over its forces’ wartime abuses, The Times newspaper Monday urged him to make good on his threat and to ignore charges of neo-colonialism in doing so.

Hailing Mr. Cameron’s ‘unequivocal’ warning to Sri Lanka’s government that if it does not conduct an independent inquiry into the last months of the civil war, he would push for one to be held under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the paper said in its editorial:

“[Mr. Cameron] should not stop there. His threat to challenge Sri Lanka at the UN should be acted upon.

The Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has accused the British Prime Minister David Cameron of being influenced by the “LTTE rump”.

Gotabhaya said that Cameorn was playing politics in Sri Lanka in order to ‘soothe’ UK-based organisations, such as the Global Tamil Forum, the British Tamils Forum and Tamils against Genocide.

The Gulf News, a Dubai-based newspaper, has called on Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to accept an international investigation, in an editorial published on Monday.

The paper said the government's campaign against the LTTE was 'marred by excesses', and that Rajapasa should admit that crimes were committed and establish responsibility for them.

See full editorial below.

In 2009, the Sri Lankan government won the decades-long struggle against the separatist Tamil Tigers, who had fought a particularly brutal war against the government with regular use of random acts of terror. The Sri Lankan army’s final campaign was marred by excesses, as the soldiers were desperate not to allow the terrorists to escape, even as they used tens of thousands of villagers as human shields to avoid the army’s assault.

Labour leader Ed Miliband said in the House of Commons today that Britain cannot let the human rights situation in Sri Lanka rest, and that his party would support any government moves to take action towards a war crimes inquiry.

"The Prime Minister of Canada and the Prime Minister of India decided not to attend this summit. In explaining his decision, Prime Minister Harper said this: 'In the past two years, we've seen a considerable worsening of the situation.

The British Premier, David Cameron, briefing the House of Commons on his trip to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), reiterating his calls for a credible, independent and international inquiry into Sri Lanka's war crimes should Colombo fail to undertake its own by March.

Following Cameron's summary of his CHOGM trip, the House of Commons embarked on an extensive discussion regarding the issues Tamils faced in Sri Lanka.

“Unfortunately, the Indian Prime Minister was not here; that is my only concern.”

“He is the closest friend we have. Had he come here, he would have run the show.”

“We Asians, we like Indians. He should have been here.”

Channel 4 News reporter, Jon Snow described his experience of the Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka and its build up as ‘trouble in paradise’.

See extracts form the blog post below.

“This turned out to be the worst attended Commonwealth leaders’ summit on record. 25 of the 53 presidents or prime ministers stayed away.”

“Hence the entire summit proved a strange event indeed.”