Poland will comply with a court order to pay $262,000 to two Guantánamo Bay inmates, foreign minister Grzegorz Schetyna said on Wednesday, as reparations for the country’s role in hosting a CIA black site where the men were tortured.

“We have to do it,” Schetyna said in an interview on Trójka Polish Radio, “because we are a country that abides laws.” He said the money would be paid out within a month, though questions remain surrounding details of the settlements.

Schetyna said details would be worked out in the next few weeks.

In July, the European court of human rights delivered an unprecedented ruling that Poland had violated international law by allowing the CIA to inflict what “amounted to torture” in 2002 at a secret facility in the forests of north-east Poland. The court found that Poland “enabled the US authorities to subject [the detainees] to torture and ill‑treatment on its territory” and was complicit in that “inhuman and degrading treatment”.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden confirmed in 2008 that the two inmates, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were waterboarded, likely during their time in black sites around the world.

Zubaydah is accused of acting as a senior lieutenant in al-Qaida. He is the first victim of the CIA detention program for whom, as the released CIA torture report makes clear, many of the techniques were developed, and he is the only prisoner known to have been subject to them all. The most recent photo of him shows an eye patch he did not have when arrested.

Nashiri is charged with planning the bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000, and legal proceedings of his case show that interrogators variously stripped him, revved a power drill near his temple and threatened to sexually assault his mother. Both men are currently being held at Guantánamo Bay.

The Strasbourg court ordered Poland to pay €100,000 ($114,000) to al-Nashiri and €130,000 ($148,000) to Zubaydah, and rejected Poland’s October appeal without an explanation. The court also demanded that Poland conduct an immediate and unsparing investigation into what happened at the jail, finding its previous inquiry into the prison flawed and insufficient.

Schetyna said details must be worked out in the next few weeks, for instance the “question of how the money will be spent and if we will have to pay it directly to the people who sued us”. “They will have a hard time using it while still in jail,” he said.

Abu Zubaydah’s lawyer told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism this week that his client would donate the payment “to victims of torture”.

The July ruling marked the first time an international court condemned a nation for its part in the CIA’s “high value detainee extraordinary rendition program”, which aviation records and other clues suggest kept black sites in Romania, Afghanistan, Thailand and the British atoll of Diego Garcia. The court found it “inconceivable” that the CIA operated its international rendition program without Poland’s knowledge and consent.

The Obama administration ended the CIA detention program in 2009. Neither the White House nor CIA have ever confirmed or commented on the locations of black sites, although former leaders of Romania and Poland have admitted their existence in their countries.