Joyce and Sybil Burden, aged 88 and 80, have lived in the home they inherited from their parents since birth. They jointly own the house and land, and with other properties their estate is valued at £875,000. Each sister has made a will leaving all her property to the other.
Under current law, when a married person dies the surviving spouse is exempt from inheritance tax. The same rules have applied to same-sex couples in civil partnerships since 2004.
However, there is no such provision for siblings and the sisters fear that when one of them dies the other will have to sell their home to pay the inheritance tax bill, levied at 40% of the value of the estate over a threshold of £285,000.
The Burden sisters are now seeking a European court of human rights ruling that their exposure to inheritance tax breaches their human rights. A hearing will be held in Strasbourg today to decide on the "merits and admissibility" of their legal action.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Does UK inheritance tax violate human rights?
The British version of the marital deduction applies also to partners in civil unions. Here's a new twist, as reported by The Guardian Online:
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2 comments:
I heard an interview with the older sister on NPR--apparently the younger one is rather ill at the moment. I believe that they've been lobbying for relief for about 15 years, but things heated up when same-sex couples got a marital deduction and siblings didn't.
I wonder if they couldn't just get married under British law (or whatever it is that same sex couples do)? Surely there's no concern about incest here, is there?
Still, if we make an exception in the death tax for siblings, the next thing you know the whole darn transfer tax system might unravel.
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