"We will not leave. We will sit down and protest here until the secretary-general withdraws the panel," Weerawansa told about 1,500 cheering supporters earlier in the day.
They burned an effigy of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and carried banners that accused him of being a puppet of the United States.
Sri Lanka has refused to co-operate with the panel, which was named by Mr Ban last month to advise on "accountability issues" during the war between government forces and the Tamil Tiger separatists.
The government has also refused to grant visas to the three members of the panel, meaning they will be unable to visit the island.
The Tiger guerrillas were defeated after decades of conflict in May 2009, and the UN has said that at least 7,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed in the first four months of last year.
Many diplomats see the UN panel, headed by Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian Attorney General, as a precursor to a full-blown war crimes investigation.
The UN office in Colombo did not comment on the protest, but the Sri Lankan government in a statement said police allowed the demonstration to "respect the entitlement to voice opinion, including through peaceful demonstration".
The government statement said it understood that the demonstrators wanted to continue their protest until the UN "revisits the matter of the panel on Sri Lanka".
Sri Lanka managed to stave off a UN resolution last year with the help of Russia and China, key allies and arms suppliers to the island.
President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly rejected international calls to investigate war crimes allegations.
Mr Ban has asked his three-member panel to complete its work in four months.
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