Ofori-Kuma v Ofori: High Court resolves family dispute over mother's cremation wishes

The Family Division has determined a bitterly contested dispute over the funeral arrangements of a woman who died intestate, ruling in favour of her three daughters and against her own mother and sister, who sought to have her buried rather than cremated.

In a judgement handed down by Mr Justice MacDonald, the court heard that Margaret Ofori-Kuma died suddenly in June 2026, leaving no will and no formally recorded wishes as to her funeral. Her mother, Mercy Ofori-Kuma, then aged 90, and her sister Victoria Ofori-Kuma applied under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court, and in the alternative under section 116 of the Senior Courts Act 1981, seeking authority to arrange a burial. The application was resisted by Margaret's three daughters, who maintained that their mother had consistently expressed a wish to be cremated.

All parties represented themselves at the hearing, though the court noted with concern the involvement of an organisation called Another Ear CIC, which had corresponded with the respondents in terms suggesting it was acting as legal representative for the applicants while separately denying that status to the court. MacDonald J directed that a copy of the judgement be sent to the Solicitors Regulation Authority in light of that inconsistency.

The central factual dispute concerned what Margaret had told her family about her wishes. Mercy relied on a single private conversation in which she said her daughter had stated she must not be cremated, though she could not recall when this took place. The three daughters gave detailed and consistent accounts of separate conversations over several years in which their mother expressed a wish to be cremated rather than buried, using recurring language about not wanting to be "left behind" or forgotten in the ground. The court also heard that the wider family, including paternal relatives, met on 10 July 2026 and, on the daughters' account, resolved to support cremation, a version of events corroborated by a paternal relative who had already paid a deposit toward the funeral.

MacDonald J preferred the daughters' evidence, finding it more compelling and internally consistent, and noting that if Margaret had made the statement Mercy described, it was likely she would also have confided it to her daughters and that it would have surfaced at the July family meeting. The applicants also relied on evidence concerning customary taboos against cremation said to attach to the family's Akyem Abuakwa Royal lineage in Ghana, but the court found this fell short of the special circumstances required to displace the statutory order of priority, particularly given the absence of any application for expert evidence and the lack of consensus between the maternal and paternal sides of the family on the applicable custom.

Applying the framework recently set out in Bains v Arsalan [2026] EWHC 1597 (Fam), the court confirmed that section 116 of the 1981 Act was the appropriate route, engaging the statutory order of priority under rule 22 of the Non-Contentious Probate Rules 1987, which places children ahead of a parent or sibling. Finding no special circumstances to justify departing from that order, MacDonald J dismissed the applications, granted the daughters a limited grant of administration to arrange the cremation, varied the existing injunction to restrict funeral arrangements to them, and ordered the applicants to pay the respondents' costs.