While headlines may scream and shout about the news of the day, it is often an encounter with personal stories that can have the strongest impact on how you might view a particular issue.

Take, for instance, the issues of asylum and refugees, which have caused quite a stir over the past week or so. First was the news that Britain was still sending back failed Zimbabwean asylum seekers to a country being devastated by Robert Mugabe's regime. Then came the news that, for the first time, the Government had estimated the number of overstayers in the country to be anywhere between 100,000 and 500,000 at the time of the last census. And then there is the unreported story of what happened to Bishop Francis Loyo last week.

The Bishop is currently studying for a masters degree at Durham University, the first time in 12 years he has been away from his diocese in southern Sudan. As a bishop whose area covers both rebel held territory and government controlled land, his diocese forms part of the front line in his country's long running civil war. While many bishops fled as a result of the war, Bishop Francis chose to remain with his flock and, under some of the most difficult conditions imaginable, created an orphanage, a school and a small hospital. He has stared down the barrel of a gun on more than one occasion and tells the tales of his life with an infectious humour and breathtaking humility.

Such is Bishop Francis's ability and experience that last week he was scheduled to fly to Geneva to meet the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and discuss the human rights situation in Sudan as well as the conditions for those returning from the violence in the Darfur region.

Unfortunately, the Bishop couldn't make the meeting because the airline due to take him there refused, in a decision worthy of the worst kind of jobsworth, to let him get on the plane.

Bishop Francis has no passport. The reason for this is simply that for the last 30 years he has lived in a country which is in civil war and it doesn't issue passports. Bishop Francis's international identity papers enabled him to fly here to study and have enabled him to hold a visa. The papers have been sufficient for him to fly to South Africa and Singapore. But for the easyJet desk at Newcastle Airport, this was insufficient.

Such was easyJet's treatment of Bishop Francis, it would be tempting to challenge the airline's charismatic founder to go to southern Sudan and ask him to find a way of getting home without his passport.

This is not just about the irony in the refusal to board someone invited to meet the United Nations to talk about migration and human rights, but rather is another case of the powerless individual at a loss in the face of a company which takes your money and then treats you like dirt.

The events in Edinburgh today remind us that there is injustice in our world. But injustice isn't always of such magnitude as to require the response of the eight most powerful men in the world. Sometimes injustice is meted out to those very people who spend their lives fighting for justice on behalf of others. Shame on you Stelios.

* Arun Arora is president of Cranmer Hall and the Wesley Study Centre, Durham. He was bishop's director of communications for the diocese of Birmingham 2000-2004.

* Harry Mead is unwell.