The court was asked whether the consent of the Charity Commissioners was necessary to petition the Court to appoint a new trustee of a charity established in England to promote Christian education in Jamaica.
Held: In the 1853 Act, ‘Charity’ was defined as ‘every endowed foundation and institution taking or to take effect in England and Wales and coming within the meaning, purview and interpretation of the statute of 43 Eliz c.4, or as to which, or the administration of the revenues or property whereof, the Court of Chancery has or may exercise jurisdiction’. The authority of the Charity Commissioners extended to charities which were founded and endowed in England or Wales, even though the revenues were applied to benefit those abroad. It was not necessary for the court to decide whether the Charity Commissioner’s powers extended to charities founded and endowed abroad who applied their revenues in England and Wales. (Obiter) that it might well be said that the institution, even though located abroad, takes effect here if it applies its property here. Lord Cairns LJ: ‘… I see no reason to doubt that, as a general rule, where there is the application and expenditure of money in England under a charitable endowment, there also the jurisdiction of the Charity Commissioners attaches, to the extent, at all events, of that application and expenditure, even though the constitution of the charity, or the corpus of the property, should be abroad.’
Turner LJ and Lord Cairns LJ
(1867) 2 LR Ch App 356
Charitable Trusts Act 1853
England and Wales
Cited by:
Doubted – Gaudiya Mission and others v Brahmachary CA 30-Jul-1997
The High Court had found the plaintiff to be a charity, and ordered the Attorney-General to be joined in. The A-G appealed that order saying that the plaintiff was not a charity within the 1993 Act. The charity sought to spread the Vaishnava . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Updated: 24 August 2021; Ref: scu.200678
