The Dead Citizens Charter

Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington (9 August 1915 - 14 January 2002) was a British sociologist, social activist and politician, and the originator of The Dead Citizens Charter.

During an active life, Young was instrumental in shaping Labour Party thinking, was a leading protagonist on social reform, and founded or helped found a number of socially useful organisations. These include the Consumers Association, the National Consumer Council, the Open University, the National Extension College, the Open College of the Arts and Language Line, a telephone interpreting business.

Young died in January 2002. An obituary in The Guardian said:

Michael Young, who has died aged 86, was a man of many parts: educator, author, academic, consumer advocate, policymaker, political activist - and rebel. Over and above these were two other roles, inventor and entrepreneur, which made him a unique figure in British 20th-century social reform. He was the country's great seeds man of social ideas and institutions. The new paths he hacked out in education, consumer rights and health services have helped millions of people. Some of his ideas - like the Open University and the Consumers' Association - have become world famous, but there were numerous other projects of which even his friends were unaware, like the do-it-yourself garage in Milton Keynes.

Together with Peter Jupp et al, Young wrote The Dead Citizens Charter: A citizens charter for the dead.

The sociologist Young observed this blanking-out of both life and death during the research he undertook for his powerful study of the dying, A Good Death. He set up a National Funerals College, with a Dead Citizens' Charter published in 1996, to try to restore a more human ritual into an event that we shall all come to. The National Funerals College no longer exists.

The Dead Citizens Charter identifies 24 rights. Some of these rights include:

• The right to arrange a funeral without the services of a funeral director.
• The right to a funeral service that recounts the life and the death of the person, recognising their uniqueness and the relationships that death has broken.
• The right to choose, subject to statutory health and safety restrictions, whether or not the body should be embalmed.
• The right to choose what happens to the body before the funeral. This includes the right to choose whether it should lie at home; what clothes are to be worn for the laying out and funeral (subject to statutory restrictions); whether the coffin is to be left open and its closure witnessed; and whether the body should rest overnight in a church or in any other place where the funeral service is to be held next day.
• The right to expect that the person, religious or secular, who is conducting the funeral, will contact and speak with the family beforehand.
• The right to a wider range of memorials.

The Natural Death Centre (NDC) made the following comments on the Dead Citizens Charter: “The charter is perhaps unfortunately named, since the dead person has few rights, beyond the right for the body to be treated with dignity and the right to be remembered for his or her qualities during life. The rights that the College enumerates are mainly those of the next-of-kin or of those looking after the funeral arrangements. The charter should be renamed the Funerals Charter”.

The NDC reportedly said that certain very specific minimum standards were hidden in the body of the text with concerns that the public will hardly ever see the full document.

In the NDC’s opinion, the following additions would have been useful: .

• The right of the next-of-kin to visit the body, whatever advice they may receive to the contrary.

[Visiting the body includes the right to see and touch. The traumatised mother, for instance, refused the right to see and touch the body of the son who died in a motorbike accident, because it was felt that it would unnecessarily distress her, is only further traumatised and left with longer term resentments.] The right, recognised by law, but sometimes obstructed by hospitals in practice, for the next-of-kin rather than a funeral director, to be given the body of the deceased by a hospital, if no funeral director is being used.

[The Natural Death Centre, on several occasions, and had to send faxes to hospitals reminding them that the next-of-kin are legally entitled to possession of the body.]

• The right for the body to remain undisturbed for a period after death, if so desired by the next-of-kin, for religious or other reasons.

[For Tibetan Buddhists and others, it is considered necessary to leave the body undisturbed for up to three days.]

• The right to obtain information leaflets - on free funerals, inexpensive funerals and funerals without funeral directors - from hospitals, registrars, citizens advice bureaux, social security offices, crematoria and cemeteries.

• The right of funeral suppliers, crematoria and cemeteries to sell cardboard and other coffins to members of the public direct, without receiving threats from funeral directors.

The Natural Death Centre knew of a number of instances where coffins had to be withdrawn from sale following threats from funeral directors.

The Office of Fair Trading looked into this abuse and issued a warning to the funeral industry.

• The right of the public to obtain a funeral through their local authority (or a simple body disposal service, for those who feel that this is all they require).

• The right to obtain information leaflets - on free funerals, inexpensive funerals and funerals without funeral directors - from hospitals, registrars, citizens advice bureaux, social security offices, crematoria and cemeteries.

Michael Young responded to the NDC by saying that its points were fair and welcome but that he didn’t agree with suggestion that the Charter be renamed the ‘Funerals Charter’. He is quoted to have said that “it would sound like something from SCI [the American funeral giant, Service Corporation International - ed] or the industry generally. Dead Citizens Charter is of course a play on Citizens Charter but why not? Dead people have hundreds of rights in law, e.g. to control the inheritances and copyrights. The rights of the bereaved are generated by the death of a person”.

Apart from legal rights, the dead could be said to have human rights, embodied in cultural and religious tradition. From the time of the ancient Egyptians, the conviction has been that corpses have the right to rest undisturbed and unmolested. William Henry Francis Basevi, in his 1920 book The Burial of the Dead, wrote that across history, cultures with almost no other rituals in common treat their dead with reverence. "In or near the grave are placed food, clothes, and weapons; while the body is protected from molestation often most elaborately. All this provision conveys the idea that there is something more in burial than the disposal of a dead man's bones."

The respect for corpses is so rooted that we even agree to deal gently with the bodies of our enemies. International rules about the treatment of the battlefield dead date back centuries. Witness Shakespeare's Henry V, in which a French herald pleads with King Henry: "I come to thee for charitable license/ That we may wander o'er this bloody field/ To book our dead, and then to bury them." The 1949 Geneva Conventions explicitly provide that prevailing forces must "search for the [enemy's] dead and prevent their being despoiled." The conventions further require that enemy "dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected, grouped if possible according to the nationality of the deceased, properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found." Violators have been convicted and imprisoned.

Rights of the dead are invoked through the living! In R v Stewart (1840) 12 Ad & El 773, 778, it was stated that every person dying in Great Britain had the right to a Christian burial, ‘the feelings and the interests of the living require this, and create the duty’. Thus the right of decent disposal of the dead was not a right of the deceased but the right of the living to have their feelings and interests protected. .

With the advent of the Human Rights Act 1998 which came into force in October 2000, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms as a reference for all decisions by public bodies in the United Kingdom, petitions for faculties based upon the Convention have been promulgated upon three distinct rights guaranteed: Article 8, respect for private and family life; Article 9, freedom of thought, conscience and religion; and, Article 1 of the First Protocol, peaceful enjoyment of possessions.