The families of British residents detained without trial by the US at Guantanamo Bay are to fight on after the High Court today refused to force the government to request their release.
Human rights lawyers acting for the families announced action to appeal against the decision would be taken "immediately".
They say there is "compelling evidence" that the detainees - Jamil el-Banna, from Jordan, and Omar Deghayes, from Libya - have been "severely tortured and suffered inhuman and degrading treatment" at the American detention facility in Cuba, and are at risk of future mistreatment.
Two senior judges were asked to declare that both men, although foreign nationals, were long-term UK residents entitled to help similar to that received by citizens freed from Guantanamo in March 2004 and January 2005 after the Foreign Office made formal requests for their release.
But the judges said they could not interfere with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's decision that he was under no duty to act because the men were not British nationals.
Later Gareth Peirce, solicitor for the families, said: "What we say is that there have been many years of disappointment in relation to the UK government's position on these non-nationals marooned in conditions of torture in Guantanamo Bay."
She said there were "strong arguments" to take to the Court of Appeal. One related to the Race Relations Act.
Ms Peirce said: "This is not an area where the Government is entitled to discriminate and it has discriminated between nationals and residents."
The wife of detainee Jamil el-Banna was present in court with two of their five children, who were both wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan "Justice for Dad" and badges with the number 905, their father's prison number. All the children are UK citizens.
Mrs Sabah el-Banna (41) who lives in Willesden, north-west London, expressed her disappointment with the ruling, but vowed to carry on the fight. "We must continue and we will appeal," she said.
In their joint written judgment, Lord Justice Latham and Mr Justice Tugendhat, sitting at the High Court in London, said the case involved the "delicate area" of foreign diplomacy.
Mr Straw considered that to make individual requests to free non-national detainees would be "ineffective", and also "counter-productive" to the efforts the British Government was making generally to secure the closure of Guantanamo Bay.
The judges said it was impossible for the court, without knowledge of how the discussions with the US authorities were progressing, to know the best way to solve the problem.
To require the Foreign Secretary to make a formal request "would be an interference in the relationship between sovereign states which could only be justified if a clear duty in domestic or international law had been identified. "There is no such duty in the present case," the judges ruled.