"We are sending a high-level official delegation to Brussels on March 15," International Trade Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris told reporters at a briefing following the weekly Cabinet meeting.
"Sri Lanka is reaching out. We expect the other side to reciprocate," he added.
EU finance ministers last month endorsed a recommendation by the European Commission to suspend preferential trade terms allowed to Sri Lanka under its Generalized System of Preferences scheme allowing duty free entry of goods into European markets.
Garments, which are Sri Lanka's top manufactured export, and ceramics will be the biggest losers under the decision to be effective from October.
The Central Bank estimates the measure could cost Sri Lanka $150 million and the industry says the figure could be much higher.
The EU decision was attributed to noncompliance with three U.N. human rights conventions -- the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the Convention of the Rights of the Child.
Peiris said Treasury Secretary P.B. Jayasundera, Foreign Secretary Romesh Jayasinghe, Justice Secretary Suhada Gamlath and Attorney General Mohan Peiris will comprise the delegation to Brussels.
He said Sri Lanka is expecting "goodwill, not obstruction at every point" from Britain, the United States and the United Nations with whom relations, as with the European Union and Norway, a non-EU member, have deteriorated, especially during the final phase of the war against Tamil separatist rebels that ended last May and in the months that followed.
Peiris accused Western countries of pressuring Sri Lanka due to domestic political issues, with senior officials saying that hundreds of thousands of Tamils who fled the fighting since 1983 and are now living in North America and Western Europe are a formidable political lobby in the countries where they now live.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's office recently set up a human rights panel to advise him on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka over which both the government and the militarily defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam stand accused.
