Britain's justice system is far from perfect. We need only look to the examples of Stephen Downing and Gerry Conlon to see things can and do go wrong.

But the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were never afflicted with scabies or forced to share a cell with 260 people.

John Bernard Sender suffered two years of hell in a Pakistani jail after he was wrongly charged with drugs offences.

Another British inmate, Dr David Du Faur, told how he was blindfolded and tortured by police and made to watch others being beaten to death.

Mr Sender was one of a number of Britons wrongly imprisoned abroad whose plight will be highlighted at a special British Victims Day this Thursday.

It is hard to imagine the terror he must have felt locked up with hundreds of other men in a dysentery-ridden cell, knowing that in secret corners of the jail men were being tortured and even killed. Luckily, Mr Sender's ordeal is now over, but it should be a lesson to all of us.

Whatever its faults, the British legal system is one of the best in the world. This is something Mr Sender - and the other Britons holed up in insanitary and dangerous jails all over the world - are never likely to forget.