Background
Margaret Ofori-Kuma died intestate on 9 June 2026. Her three adult daughters maintained that she had repeatedly expressed a wish to be cremated and remain close to them. Her mother, Mercy Ofori-Kuma, opposed cremation and claimed that Margaret had privately said she must not be burned. Mercy and Margaret’s sister, Victoria Ofori-Kuma, also relied on the burial customs of Margaret’s asserted Akyem Abuakwa royal maternal lineage in Ghana.
Mercy and Victoria sought authority under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction, or alternatively a limited grant under section 116 of the Senior Courts Act 1981, to place Mercy in charge of the funeral. Margaret’s daughters had applied for letters of administration and, under rule 22 of the Non-Contentious Probate Rules 1987, ranked ahead of Margaret’s mother and sister. An interim injunction had paused the daughters’ arrangements pending determination of the dispute.
The Court’s Holding
Mr Justice MacDonald dismissed Mercy and Victoria’s applications. Applying section 116, the court held that no special circumstances justified displacing the daughters’ priority under the probate rules. On the balance of probabilities, Margaret had told her daughters that she wished to be cremated. The judge accepted their consistent accounts and rejected Mercy’s evidence that Margaret had expressed the opposite wish.
The asserted maternal customs did not amount to special circumstances requiring a different administrator. The evidence showed no consensus between Margaret’s maternal and paternal families, and Margaret did not automatically follow family traditions. The court made a limited grant to the three daughters so they could obtain Margaret’s body and arrange her funeral rites and cremation, varied the injunction to prevent anyone else from making funeral arrangements, and ordered Mercy and Victoria to pay the daughters’ costs.
Key Takeaways
- In an intestacy, the deceased’s children ordinarily rank ahead of a parent or sibling for a grant of administration and the associated responsibility for disposing of the body.
- Section 116 permits the court to depart from that priority only where special circumstances make another appointment necessary or expedient.
- A deceased person’s wishes and relevant cultural traditions may inform the analysis, but neither is automatically determinative; the court evaluates all the evidence and the deceased’s individual circumstances.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates that disputes over burial and cremation should ordinarily be resolved through the statutory probate framework before resort to the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction. Courts may consider how competing proposed administrators intend to conduct the funeral, even though the central legal question is who should have authority to make the arrangements.
It also shows that generalized evidence of family, religious or cultural custom will not necessarily override the probate order of priority or credible evidence of the deceased’s personal wishes, particularly where the family itself disagrees about the applicable tradition.