Holiday isle to vote on suicide clinic
Politicians on Guernsey set to back bid to allow terminally ill people to end their life
GUERNSEY is set to become the first place in the British Isles to have a suicide clinic.
A vote to allow terminally ill people to end their life on the Channel Island is likely to be taken by politicians in May. Sources say the plan is expected to get the go-ahead.
It comes three years after the late MSP Margo MacDonald’s bid for a bill on assisted dying was rejected at Holyrood.
Guernsey’s chief minister Gavin St Pier is backing the proposal to allow assisted dying for terminally-ill adults who are mentally competent and who have been given six months or less to live.
He said: “This is about giving people choice and a sense that they have some control.
“I have personal experience of my father who died from cardiovascular disease.
“It was not a comfortable death and it was also not the death that he would have chosen for himself.”
The holiday isle of Guernsey is a British Crown Dependency and is able to set its own laws.
But they have to go before the Privy Council – a group of Westminster politicians who would discuss the implications for the UK.
If the legislation is passed, it could pave the way for people from mainland UK to travel to a suicide clininc in Guernsey. Currently, people in the UK wanting help to end their life legally have to travel to Switzerland.
A 2015 poll by Dignity in Dying found 82 per cent of the public were in favour of legalising assisted dying.