It is more for the record that we report on the most recent failure of an organization to get registered as a charity and to have that rejection upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal.
The organization, Humanics Institute,1 despite knowing that it has been more than a decade since the Federal Court of Appeal agreed with a rejected applicant for charitable registration, appealed to the FCA…and as usual in such cases, the appeal was rejected out of hand by a unanimous panel.
We wish we could bring readers some sort of analysis about the case but the fact of the matter is that the reasons for judgement do not really set out what it was that Humanic was set up to do. We intuit that the organization may have been promoting some sort of religious programme of a non-traditional type.
The closest we get to an explanation is in the opening paragraphs where the Court says:
”First, the appellant’s purposes and objects were broad and vague. Second, the activities proposed in support of its stated purposes, particularly the plan to build and maintain a sanctuary and sculpture park,would not advance religion or education in the charitable sense. Third, the appellant’s proposed funding of a foreign scholarship would constitute neither the organization’s own activities nor the funding of a qualified donee.”
Suffice to say there is nothing much in the reasons for judgement to make it worth reading unless one knows a lot more of the background that what is set out. But whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of the specific case, the decision continues the unbroken string of losses of appellants before the Federal Court of Appeal.
1 Humanics Institute v. The Minister of National Revenue 2014 FCA 265