WASHINGTON — In June, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of a Canadian man who contends that U.S. authorities mistook him for an al Qaeda operative in 2002 and shipped him to a secret prison in Syria, where he was beaten with electrical cables and held in a grave-like cell for 10 months.

Four years earlier, however, the Canadian government had concluded an exhaustive inquiry and found that the former prisoner, Maher Arar, was telling the truth. Canada cleared Arar of all ties to terrorism and paid him $10 million in damages, and his lawyers say he's cooperating with an investigation into the role of U.S. and Syrian officials in his imprisonment and reported torture.

Arar's case illustrates what lawyers and human rights groups call a shameful trend: While U.S. courts and the Obama administration have been reluctant or unwilling to pursue the cases, countries that once backed former President George W. Bush's war on terrorism are carrying out their own investigations of the alleged U.S. torture program and the role that their governments played in it.

Judges in Great Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland and Lithuania are preparing to hear allegations that their governments helped the CIA run secret prisons on their soil or cooperated in illegal U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects. Spanish prosecutors also have filed criminal charges against six senior Bush administration officials who approved the harsh interrogation methods that detainees say were employed at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo Bay and other sites.

Another former prisoner whose case the Supreme Court dismissed, Khaled El-Masri of Germany, has sued the government of Macedonia for handing him over to CIA agents, who he charges tortured him in Afghanistan. His case is pending in the European Court of Human Rights, in France.

"As a result of the passage of time and the frustration of victims ... there's a movement to see what legal options exist outside the United States," said James Goldston, the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, a legal project of George Soros' Open Society Institute, who's helped represent El-Masri.

The trend, although it's slow-moving and involves disparate plaintiffs, forums and legal strategies, could represent the end of a reviled chapter of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, which ensnared hundreds of detainees with the clandestine cooperation of dozens of countries. Now, some of those countries, led by new governments or under pressure from their citizens, are trying to pry open those secrets.

"This is the remarkable thing: Other countries are reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration's torture program, and meanwhile the United States is not," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security program.

"That's part of why we're so concerned. The Obama administration, rather than investigate the abuses of the last eight years, has increasingly become an obstacle to accountability."

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Tracy Schmaler, didn't respond to requests for comment.

Detainees already have won one victory in a foreign court: Last November, an Italian judge convicted a CIA station chief and 22 other Americans — nearly all CIA officers and contractors — in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric who ended up in a secret prison in Egypt. The victory was largely symbolic, however; the Americans were tried in absentia and aren't expected to serve jail time.