A brief followup to my earlier post. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition in Britain isn't as interested in "looking forward" on torture as the Obama administration:
A judge-led inquiry is to be held into claims British security services were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, the BBC understands.
[...]
The inquiry will offer compensation to those people who are found to have been the victims of torture carried out by foreign security services but with the knowledge of intelligence officials.
Keep in mind that the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to review the case of Mahar Arar, a Canadian national who was tortured after being transferred from American to Syrian custody. In doing so they avoided a definitive ruling that extraordinary rendition is illegal. They also left it to Congress and the White House to devise a remedy for Arar, who wasn't in any way connected to terror.
Arar's lawyers are optimistic this will happen, although it hasn't yet. But they're moving slowly by any objective measure--the Canadian government compensated Arar in 2007.