Consistory court considerations on the identification of buried remains
The permanence of Christian burial and the application of Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam 299 has been a continuing theme on L&RUK, and has also been explored in Leading Works on Law and Religion. This is the first of three posts in which we consider exhumation for the purpose of examining the remains of monarchs, mass murderers, and for medical research. Most recently, in Re St. John’s Cemetery Elswick [2018] ECC New 4, the court granted a faculty for a temporary disinterment for the purposes of obtaining a DNA analysis from bone fragments to be taken from the remains, in relation to a criminal conviction of the petitioner’s husband. Continue reading