Deaf boys and girls from the Delhi Deaf Friendship Club and The Deaf Way were able to put on a short skit or two for the audience to understand the actual situations where deaf people are absolutely cut off due to the lack of communication access.

The Honourable Justice Geeta Mittal was coordinating the program and brought out many salient points on legal capacity and the issues facing disabled people. A case in point was how shall a deaf illiterate person identify a document and/or a signature. this is something i am up against my self as an interpreter having seen the situation live. a deaf woman was asked if this is her husbands will. by the time i could ask if she understood what a will was since she was using very rudimentary home signs and the concept of will is probably not clear to her, she jumped at the document which has the photo of her husband stuck on it. The judge took this to mean that she has attested the document was genuine and the signature was genuine when in fact the case was based on the fact that the will was forged. Naturally i was taken aback at this and interevened and said she has only identified her husbands photo since i had not even signed/interpreted the question before she was shown the document. My intervention was recorded but not taken into consideration and the proceedings went on as before. Later on in break i mentioned to the court that she is in fact unable to verify documents if she has no reading and writing skills, further even for a literate person the competent authority verifies signatures such a bank manager whose job it is to verify all signatures against specimen. This put everything in a new light and the court took a view that the document should be properly verified. For me how ever it was a new insight into what can and cannot be done by deaf persons or maybe should not be done so they are protected from their vulnerabilities.

An illiterate person in any case cannot identify a document unless it is read out to them and still in the case of forgery or modification the linguistic nuance and legal terminology may still prove hard to differentiate, surely signatures should be verified by competent authority.

i would love to hear what others are doing on this and how others are dealing with this situation. please do write me or comment here.