Read: The story of how the UK government is treating a deaf man from Afghanistan (via the Guardian)

An article in the Guardian today, by Aditya Chakrabortty, has told the story of a deaf former asylum seeker called Ahmadza who is from Afghanistan and was nearly deported last month, in treatment described as being ‘brutal.’

Read the full article here. Here’s an extract below:

The term everyone uses for Ahmadzai is “vulnerable”. His friends say it. People who work with him say it. Even tough-minded judges use it, again and again. And when you meet him, as I did last week, you see why. He is skin and bones and wide brown eyes, and he wears on each ear a hearing aid that fizzes static. The authorities have him down as 21 years old, but that seems a stretch. His housemate Khalil Niazi says: “He is like a child. I make sure he’s OK.”

Ahmadzai certainly came to Britain as a child, nearly six years ago, from provincial Afghanistan. His father, a policeman, had just been murdered by the Taliban. Then they came looking for him, he recalls, and his mother sent him away. On arrival in Britain, the boy applied for asylum but somehow it was recorded that he had grandparents in Kabul who could look after him. Ahmadzai denies ever saying such a thing, while Niazi reckons the interpreter just didn’t understand him: “My other Afghan friends – even they can’t catch what he’s saying.” Court documents I have seen agree he has “complex speech, language and communication difficulties”.