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Re Holy Cross Cemetery

Newcastle Consistory Court: Wood Dep Ch, 29 January 2016 [2016] ECC New 2 Exhumation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2016

Ruth Arlow*
Affiliation:
Chancellor of the Dioceses of Norwich and Salisbury
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Abstract

Type
Case Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2016 

The petitioner sought a faculty for the exhumation of the remains of his sister (who had died as a child in 1981) and for their re-interment in an unconsecrated part of the same cemetery. The petitioner and his sister were part of the local Chinese Christian community and, at the time of the interment, their parents were relatively new immigrants who did not speak English. At that time there was only a small Chinese community locally and there was no identifiable burial ground for that community. The petitioner sought to re-inter his sister's remains in a section on the far side of the cemetery now used for Chinese burials, in which family members had already been buried or had acquired the rights of burial. In granting the faculty the chancellor found that exceptional circumstances existed and identified a number of relevant factors: the sudden death of a young person in circumstances when her parents were unable to consult and communicate the family's wishes and feelings effectively; the absence of any link between the sister and the community in which she was buried; the strong cultural importance of establishing family graves to members of this community; the economical use of land by the use of a family grave; and the fact that the delay was credible and understandable given the petitioner's difficulty of speaking about his sister's death with older members of the family and the recent death of his grandmother. [RA]