A new bill, allowing the takeover of 36 private companies is due to be presented in parliament on the 9th of November, the Daily Mirror reports.

The bill, called ‘The Revival of Underperforming Enterprises and Underutilized Assets’, will allow the state to take over the companies and their assets.

International human rights group, Amnesty International, slammed the Commonwealth for failing a "critical moral challenge" through its inaction on Sri Lanka at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth last week.

Amnesty's National Director, Claire Mallinson, said,

“It is an absolute disgrace that Commonwealth leaders have agreed to hold their next meeting in Sri Lanka in spite of its appalling human rights record.”

Sri Lanka has been aiming to boost its trade with Canada, with a delegation meeting with businessmen in Toronto earlier this week, despite Canada’s continued concern regarding Sri Lanka’s war-time abuses committed against the Tamil people.

The ten-member delegation visited the country after a gap of almost three years, attempting to enhance trade links between the two. The visit though comes at a time when Canada is lobbying for Sri Lanka to be held accountable for violations of international humanitarian law.

Sri Lanka’s controversial reconciliation commission has completed its report and will present it to President Mahinda Rajapakse in the second week of November.

The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission was set up by the President and was supposed to look into the conflict with the Tamil Tigers, but it has been slammed by human rights organisations and foreign officials as a farce.

The spokesman for the LLRC, Lakshman Wickramasinghe told reporters, that it is not in the commission’s hand to make it public.

The ever-growing Sri Lankan Army has announced that it will more than triple the number of intelligence battalions it has in order to counter future “internal and external threats”.

Defence Secretary Gothbaya Rajapakse said that,

British Prime Minister David Cameron has spoken to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and warned him that he must show progress on human rights in order to have countries attending the 2013 CHOGM and once again called for an independent investigation into war crimes.

Speaking at the 2011 CHOGM in Perth, Cameron aligned himself with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who has threatened to boycott the next meeting in Perth, unless war human rights law violations were addressed.

The leader of the BJP, India’s main opposition party, has demanded an immediate stop to the attacks perpetrated by the Sri Lankan Navy on Tamil Nadu’s fishermen.

"Sri Lanka must be told firmly that the repeated attacks on Indian fishermen must end," he told reporters in Madurai.

"It should not be regarded as a local matter as it does not relate to Tamil Nadu only. It must be regarded as a part of the national strategy and the government must evolve a plan on how to deal with it," he said.

“[Canadian] Prime Minister Stephen Harper deserves credit for making Sri Lanka an issue at the Commonwealth summit in Australia this week.

“There are other human rights offenders in the [Commonwealth], to be sure. But Sri Lanka is in a class of its own.”

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