How old is Yaya Diaby?

Yaya Diaby is engrossed in the soccer match playing out on a TV screen inside a Barcelona bar. “I’m a good forward,” says this young man from Mali. His passport and his residency permit state that he has just turned 16, but the Barcelona attorney’s office believes that he is of age (18), and since December 30 Diaby has been sleeping in a city shelter after being kicked out of the youth center where he was staying.

Diaby has a court ruling in his favor that says that the tests run on him to determine his age (radiological and an orthopantomogram, or dental X-ray) were unreliable and incomplete, and that nobody has been able to disprove the validity of his passport. “It must be inferred that he is underage,” the ruling reads.

But this was not enough. The attorney’s office attempted to run the tests again after the court ruling, but Diaby, on the advice of his lawyer, refused on the grounds that the matter had already been resolved. So the attorney’s office issued a decree stating that he is of age because he refused new X-rays.

“I’m wasting my life,” laments Diaby. Ever since he arrived in Spain in 2007, he has been evicted from two youth centers, slept in the streets, undergone a court case and lived in five different cities. He says he got to Spain after paying the equivalent of 500 euros and boarding a boat with 75 other people that took four days to reach the Canary Islands. “I was 12 then,” he claims.

He stayed in Tenerife for 45 days, until the Red Cross sent him to Madrid, where he had a friend. He stayed with this friend for a while, but “things got complicated.” He then turned to an immigrant support group that loaned him 300 euros to obtain his passport. “My mother did the paperwork in Mali and sent it to me through a fellow countryman,” he explains. Diaby opens the document and points at the date of birth: December 8, 1995.

With his passport now in his power, he took a bus to Barcelona, where he wanted to live. After getting off the bus, he went straight to a bar. “I asked a man for help. I told him I was underage and he called the police,” he says.

Diaby became a ward of the Catalan government, which gave him room and board at the youth center of El Bosc. But a forensic report based on bone tests soon determined that Diaby was “at least 18 years old.” This document was used by the attorney’s office to issue its first decree against him in March 2010, and he was evicted from the center.

Diaby then spent 20 days living on the streets, until the Catholic charity Cáritas took him in. A social worker was interested in his case, and a lawyer named Albert Parés appealed the regional government’s decision. Diaby spent a year in Sabadell, where he took Spanish and Catalan lessons and played soccer, until a court ruled in his favor in March of last year. The case judge criticized the fact that nobody had challenged the validity of his passport if indeed there were grounds to suspect that it was invalid, and that nobody had even contacted the Malian Embassy to investigate the way in which it was issued. She also noted that the forensic expert who conducted the tests admitted to a margin of error, and that the report did not include any additional physical checks.

After that, Diaby once again became a ward of the Generalitat and was admitted into a center in Sant Salvador de Guardiola. He then filed for residency, a document that lists him as 16 years old. Everything seemed fine... until the attorney’s office again requested bone tests. He refused, and he was automatically considered over 18.

“We are doing nothing illegal,” says the Barcelona minors’ attorney, Juan José Márquez, who believes that the court ruling does not establish that Diaby is actually underage, only that the tests are questionable. That is why his department requested new tests.

Márquez adds that new evidence has emerged, including photographs of his arrival in the Canaries where he appears much older than 12, and information from a police database showing his birth date as earlier than that reflected on his passport.

Now Diaby’s lawyer, Albert Parés, says he is considering taking action against regional youth authorities. In the meantime, Diaby says that he just wants to return to Sabadell, play soccer, study, learn Catalan, and when he is of age, “work in a restaurant.”