The petitioners sought a faculty for the exhumation of the cremated remains of their daughter, Carla, who had died in 1980 at the age of four months, for their re-interment at Kingston Regional Cemetery in Tasmania. The petitioners had moved to Tasmania in 1987. They had now secured burial rights for their own remains in a specific plot in the cemetery and they wished Carla's remains to be buried there too when the first of their sets of remains were interred. The chancellor referred to his decision in Re Peters’ Petition [2013] PTSR 420, where he had held that the creation or consolidation of a family grave would not generally, of itself, be sufficient to justify exhumation, as to hold otherwise would undermine the norm of permanence. When a child predeceases parents, difficult questions arise about burial in consecrated ground. To defer burial of ashes in such a case would deny grieving parents the comfort of a ceremony which symbolised committing their child to God; the Church would not want to discourage interment. Whereas it would not be appropriate for ashes to be moved from place to place as parents move home, where it appears that the parents now have a settled home concerns about treating remains as portable cannot apply. In this case the petitioners were not simply seeking to facilitate ease of visiting, as shown by their deferral of the date of exhumation until one of them died. Equally, it was relevant that the petitioners now live in Australia rather than more locally. While recognising that there was nothing wrong with a child's remains being interred many thousands of miles from the remains of her parents, the chancellor noted that the deeply personal wishes of the next of kin should be respected if possible. The fact that the chancellor did not know whether the relevant part of the cemetery was consecrated was immaterial. The faculty was granted. The chancellor did not find it desirable for a faculty to remain open-ended in terms of the time for completion of the permitted works and as such the faculty was granted for a period of 25 years, on the understanding that the petitioners could apply for an extension of that period later if they needed to. [RA]
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