As the Taliban took control of Afghanistan again after 20 years, the resettlement of refugees to the UK became a matter of life or death.  

Now urgent legal support is needed for asylum cases, appeals and family reunifications,  as well as other housing and family issues.

At the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association (ACAA), we are working round the clock to support these refugees - with over 600 people a day coming to our centre - but we need funding to keep up with this huge demand.

Please donate anything you can and share this page with family and friends on social media and via email/WhatsApp! Any support you can give us is greatly appreciated.

Who do we support?

We have been overwhelmed with British Afghans coming to our office in London, from all across the country, for support and guidance for how they can support their families stuck in Afghanistan.

Frequently, the cases involve relatives who worked for the previous Afghan government, or who were members of the Afghan National Army. For many Afghans, their work has caused them to be at higher risk of being targeted by the Taliban.

In one case, the family was in danger because a family member worked with an NGO. One member of the family had been kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban and was later released. The family received a warning letter from the Taliban threatening them, and left their house the day the Taliban took Kabul. The client was in Afghanistan during the evacuations, and tried to take their family out with them. 

They all managed to pass through some checkpoints, but were prevented from boarding the plane, so the client was forced to leave Afghanistan without their family. The family stayed near Kabul Airport hoping they would be successful in getting an alternative evacuation flight. All of the family are now in a state of depression and despair with little hope for what might happen next. 

Why we need a legal fund?

We now need to raise funds for legal advisers to deliver free immigration, housing, family and civil advice to Afghan refugees in the UK. 

ACAA will run a legal advice service to provide all levels of immigration, housing and family advice needed for Afghan refugees arriving in the UK. A structured legal advice clinic will be set up, along with ongoing psycho-social support from ACAA staff.

After all our clients have been though, we want to ease their journey through the immigration system by giving them support right from the very beginning. This means access to the correct level of advisor/representation, language support and psycho-social support to deal with any difficult emotional issues that arise out of the legal process. 

This work will also enable us to gather a body of evidence along with case studies to support our policy work around the immigration system in the UK.  In particular we will be seeking to influence the legal system for newly arriving Afghans.

Refugee-led services are essential

Our founder and most of our staff and volunteers have lived experience of being refugees in the UK. As a grassroots, frontline charity we can observe first-hand the needs of our service users and include them in the development of our work, as we have done since our organisation was founded.

Our work starts not with the service but with the person. Refugees have experienced levels of fear and deprivation few people can imagine. To simply assume the people referred to us are all the same, or that their needs can be met with generic responses, would be very naive. 

Because our charity is founded, led and run by former refugees, we are very sensitive to their needs and work extremely hard to ensure these are fully understood.

More about the ACAA

Established in 2000, the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association is an award-winning charity with more than 20 years of experience supporting the integration of refugees and asylum seekers into mainstream British society through the provision of a wide range of social, cultural and educational services.

The charity was founded by its current Director, Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi, who fled Afghanistan with his young family in 1999, travelling for three months across Europe before finally arriving in the UK in the back of a refrigerated lorry to claim asylum. 

The challenges he faced trying to integrate into British society motivated him to create the ACAA and focus on the needs he found were missing when first arriving as a refugee. Most staff and volunteers working at the charity also share lived experience of life as a refugee in the UK.