At the beginning of the game Far Cry 4, you are bringing an urn with your mother’s cremated ashes back to her home country. You get a message from a US Embassy official who says that in order to bring the urn with you, you’ll need a passport for the deceased. 
Is that actually true? Do you need to have the passport of a dead person to transport their remains across international borders? Does it make a difference if the person is whole in a coffin or an urn of cremated ashes?
I don’t know. But this reminds me of a true story I was told. In Hawaii, one of my fellow students was from Mozambique in southern Africa. As he related, he and some colleagues once had to go fetch the body of another colleague who died suddenly several countries away. At the border of one country – I think it was Mozambique itself – the border guard insisted on seeing the deceased’s passport. They didn’t have it, as all of his stuff had been mailed back. According to my friend, the guard finally relented and gave the group the warning: “Next time, I’ll need to see his papers!”
So I suppose it’s possible.
I can imagine you’ll have one hell of a hard time getting the deceased person to sit for a picture and sign the forms.
They might ask for a passport because its a quick way of entering whose remains they were into the official record. If a citizen dies overseas, one way for an embassy go acertain exactly who it was is through the use of a passport.
… *Also, the airlines require that the body be shipped in an approved container or “air-tray.” Additionally, each foreign country has different rules and regulations regarding the shipping of human remains. Some of the more common requirements would be for the following documents to accompany the body: death certificate, embalming report, passport, burial permit, *…
Actually the “sitting for a picture” part should be dead easy.
I would have assumed there were a lot of rules about shipping dead bodies, but I would think any rules about ashes would be impossible to enforce. They aren’t very large, don’t have much odor, don’t require any special storage, … and really, don’t look very different from sand.
Since ashes don’t rot or harbor diseases, I’d also be surprised to learn there are many rules about transporting them.
Apparently to bring it into the US at least - this is not needed:
I read it as saying you don’t need anything if it is already cremated, but they must be in a container that can be xrayed.
There is a commonly held belief that to transport a body across county boundaries in the UK requires permission from the Coroner (and fees to be paid). I believed this but, since this is SD, I checked first.
It turns out that there are virtually no regulations about transporting bodies by road. No doubt, if you just bundled the dear departed into the boot of your car, you might have some explaining to do if stopped by the cops, but there is no actual law, as far as I can see, that lays down any rules.
There seem to be an endless number of both desperadoes and town notables from the old west era, propped up for one final photo.
Gives new meaning to the adage “if you look like your passport photo, you’re not well enough to travel.”
There is a least one German jurisdiction in which a “Pass Check for Corpse” is required. Here’s an authentic specimen (this is no joke, BTW):
I also remember talking to a lady who worked for a funeral home about this: There are (again, this is Germany) rules about transporting a dead person. The car must never be left unattended, so if there’s only the driver, he isn’t allowed to take a leak. Overnight, the body has to be stored at a morgue; the car with the dead body may not just be parked in a garage (event if it is locked).
After a body is cremated, the ashes are never handed over the spouse or the relatives. This would be illegal (there are ways to circumvent this, though).
Do you have any idea WHY it is illegal to give the ashes to the next of kin?
I have no definitive answer. It would be my guess that the general feeling always has been (and still is) that all human remains should always be buried.
A funny idea coming from a culture that built reliquaries to keep bits of saints knocking around. At least, my sense is that most of the reliquaries I’ve seen came out of Germany.
I think that was more of a Catholic thing in general and also very ancient.
Embassy official:
<looks at passport>
<looks at urn>
<looks at passport>
<looks at urn>
“Yeah, you’re good to go.”
Donnerwetter is right. I live in Germany and, funny thing, I had a conversation on this topic at a dinner party recently. We were discussing space travel and I mentioned how “Scotty” Doohan and a few other well-known people had had their ashes shot off into space. The Germans at the table (I was the sole American) were amused by the idea but told me there’ll never be Deutsche Restasche (cremains of a German citizen) circling the earth because crematoria here are not allowed to release ashes to the next of kin. The remains have to sent to a funeral home and then placed in a grave or a columbarium.
Don’t know about international, but when my nephew had to take my step-sister’s ashes across the USA, the main hassle was how to inspect the (carry-on) metal urn for contraband. They didn’t ask for her ID, and more dangerously, didn’t check her name against the no-fly list.
The suggestion was that he put her in checked baggage, but that would likely have triggered a worse situation with TSA inspectors opening this odd metal object and spilling ashes all over the place.
Another nephew is a pilot, and one of his “workplace stories” was about the fellow in his late 90’s who died on the way back from Europe. His almost as elderly widow and his daughter tried to pretend he was sleeping when they got to JFK, but the medical staff was called; so the body had to be officially processed and it would be a big delay and cost a small fortune to get him on the final leg of the flight home; casket, cargo transport fees, medical exam costs, etc. The family hoped to just wheel him onto the next flight and sort things out (much more simply) when they got home.