The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)

You will have to deal with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (the FCDO) if your next of kin has died abroad.

They have a role in co-ordinating the notification that your loved one has died. If they are informed of the death of a British national abroad, they will ask the UK Police to tell you as soon as possible. If you are also abroad at the time, and they have your contact details, they will ask the consular staff in the country where you are to do this.

It is possible that you might hear about the death before this official notification, especially due to social media and 24-hour news. If you hear of the death abroad from someone else, you should contact the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) on 020 7008 5000.

Once you are in contact with the FCDO, and you have agreed a single point of contact within your family, they should assign that person a named caseworker from their Murder & Manslaughter Team. The caseworker’s role is to give you practical information about what to do next as well as country-specific information. They will also offer you a referral to the Victim Support Homicide Service who will contact you to explain the services they can offer.

Unlike when Murdered Abroad was founded, there are now several services available for bereaved families, but this can cause confusion about who is who and who does what and when. Some of our time at Murdered Abroad is spent explaining this to families and ensuring they know the basic level of support to which they are entitled.

In the case of suspicious deaths, access to the Murder & Manslaughter Team and the Victim Support Homicide Service might not be immediately possible. This can be particularly traumatic for families to feel excluded from a basic level of support. This is something that Murdered Abroad continues to campaign to improve. If you are in this position, do not despair, we, and other charities are ready to help you.

Murdered Abroad Trustees meet quarterly with the Head of the Murder & Manslaughter Team and are active participants in the FCDO’s annual stakeholder meetings. This provides us with an opportunity to learn about developments of the team and offer our support and opinions. We are keen to ensure that the team remains accountable and we are not afraid to challenge them where things have not gone as expected. We can escalate concerns and queries on behalf of families within these meetings and have done so to positive effect. If you have any feedback on your experience with the FCDO (or FCO as it used to be called), please feel free to share it with us, so we can feed-back to them and continue our work to improve the service offered to bereaved families.

It’s fair to say that the FCDO has come under fire from bereaved families in the past. We know of some shocking examples of terrible service and comments that have absolutely re-traumatised families. We do not excuse or forgive this, but continue to work constructively for change. We lobbied for many years to get the Murder & Manslaughter Team in place. This was finally agreed after the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (to which we gave both oral and written evidence) recommended this. We have also worked closely with the FCDO to establish the ground-breaking Memorandum of Understanding between the FCDO, Police and Coroners in England and Wales. Our Co-Founders, worked tirelessly for many years to make this agreement between the three key agencies a reality. The first MoU was signed in 2012 and it was recently revised (again, with extensive input from us, on behalf of all bereaved families) in 2020.