A ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Poland allowed a secret CIA jail on its soil became final on Tuesday after the court in Strasbourg rejected a request for an appeal submitted by the Polish government.
Poland must now pay compensation to two men who were held in the CIA jail, and must quickly bring to a conclusion a criminal investigation into whether Polish officials were guilty of allowing the jail to operate.
The court decision will add to pressure on Poland - and other European countries who helped the CIA's global program of secret detention after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States to reveal the full extent of their involvement.
Many of the details were already made public in December, when the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report detailing how dozens of detainees were subject to torture, with little useful intelligence gained as a result.
After the release of the report, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller acknowledged for the first time that they knew about the CIA was holding people on Polish soil.
But they said they knew nothing about what was happening inside the detention center, codenamed Quartz, on the grounds of an intelligence training committee in a Polish forest.
There was no immediate comment from the Polish government on Tuesday