The Assisted Dying Bill will return to the Keys in the new year with a major amendment made to the residency requirements.
Under the Bill sent up from Keys, people wishing to access a potential assisted death would have had to be resident for five years.
However, when MLCs sat this morning they agreed to shorten that to one year.
While there have been concerns from MHKs that this could lead to so called “death tourism”, MLCs have amended the Bill to say that people must be resident at the time of their diagnosis.
Rob Mercer MLC moved the amendment and said he had “tried to walk a fine line between providing compassion and addressing concerns”.
He said: “This amendment directly addresses that concern [death tourism] and ensures that a person must be ordinarily resident and goes further by adding that they must have become order ordinarily resident for at least a year prior to receiving their terminal diagnosis.”
Peter Greenhill MLC said told of how he moved to the island 11 years ago and was after four years, was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
He told members: “I would not have been able to use assisted dying had I been terminally ill, and that, to me, is a very important thing to bear in mind, to protect people who’ve moved here for proper reasons.”
Registered
Seeking to further strengthen the time safeguards, Diane Kelsey moved an amendment which will require those seeking an assisted death to be registered with an island GP.
She said: “This echoes the clause within the Westminster bill, which obviously is only it’s being discussed at the moment, and may or may not be, it may not stick, but it felt like in in conjunction with all the other things about being a resident, being settled.
“If we don’t have somebody who’s registered with the general medical practice, and is there a possibility of things slipping through the net, so it just felt like a very sensible addition.”
These changes, alongside others that were made by MLCs will go back to the Keys to either accept or change in the new year.
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