Your legal rights and responsibilities
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Who’s in charge?
There’s no law that says you have to have a funeral.
But there is a law that says you must dispose of the body of the person who has died ‘by burial, cremation or any other means’ (Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953).
The law views a dead body as a potential health hazard and it enables one or more people to take possession of a dead body for the sole purpose of disposing of it. Note that word ‘possession’. Possessing a dead body is not the same as owning it. No one o...
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