In this guest post, Mark Hill KC considers some of the issues raised in the recent judgment of the High Court of South Africa, Gauteng Division, Pretoria, in Government of the Republic of Zambia v Lungo and others.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the range of sensitive issues attendant upon the legal treatment of the dead. Ecclesiastical courts, for example, are much exercised by petitions seeking the exhumation of human remains when inventive arguments of exceptionality are raised to try and justify a departure from the legal principle and doctrinal norm concerning the permanence of Christian burial.[1] English common law has long recognised that there is ‘no property in a corpse’.[2] The late Lord Judge (formerly Chief Justice of England and Wales) suggested that this legal principle derived, in part at least, from a traditional understanding that a dead body was the temple of the Holy Ghost, and as such it was sacred and inviolate.[3] The exceptional feature in the recent case of Government of the Republic of Zambia v Lungo and others [2025] ZAGPPHC 096565 was that the corpse was that of a former head of state: and the added complexity was that wishes of the deceased’s relatives and those of the government of the country concerned were substantially at variance.

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