Respect the rights of citizens

The Supreme Council is constantly improving the legislative framework governing road safety and punishing violations of its Rules. At the same time, deputies always rely on the opinion of road users themselves.

A group of deputies of the Legislation Committee composed of Galina Antyufeyeva, Oleg Petrik, Vitaliy Kalin, Vadim Lipsky and Grigory Dyachenko initiated amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses (CAO). Numerous appeals to the deputies from drivers are the basis for the development of the law-in-draft. They inform the people’s representatives about the features of the regular operation conducted by the state traffic inspectors in conjunction with the employees of the state service of court bailiffs of the Ministry of Justice. In the course of it, debtor drivers who fail to pay administrative fines for traffic violations on time are identified and held accountable. At the same time, some of them are detained and taken to militia to draw up a protocol for failure to pay a fine on time.

The specific figures of one of these operations were cited by parliamentarian Oleg Petrik during the hearing.

Moreover, as many drivers claimed in their appeals to the deputies, they did not receive documents on offenses recorded using special technical means that have the functions of photo and video recording (so-called letters of happiness). Due to various circumstances, not all of them live where they are registered. According to the State Unitary Enterprise “Pridnestrovian Post”, postmen deliver up to 100 thousand various kinds of notifications to citizens each year, half of this amount is from the sender represented by the Ministry of the Interior. Their representatives believe that the proper notification of a person about a committed offense is a leaflet in the mailbox indicating that the registered letter was in the post office. Therefore, the authors of the law-in-draft consider that this state of affairs, as well as the ambiguous interpretation by authorized persons of legal relations related to the proper notification of persons, violates the rights of Pridnestrovian citizens to a fair and comprehensive consideration of cases of administrative offenses. Just around the concept of “appropriate / inappropriate notice” during the parliamentary hearings, a heated debate developed.

The law-in-draft adopted in the first reading by the Supreme Council, which corrects the norms of the Code of Administrative Offenses, is called upon to resolve all these problems. According to the authors of the law-in-draft, the notice must be personally presented under the signature or the refusal of the offender to receive it should be recorded. Along with this, the possibility of drawing up a second protocol with respect to offenses identified by the Safe City system is excluded. According to the Deputy of the Supreme Council Grigory Dyachenko, traffic militia officers could notify drivers of their offenses when they stopped their vehicles. Along with this, the deputies of the Supreme Council in the first reading adopted a legislative initiative of the Government to notify citizens of their administrative offenses through SMS messages.

As it turned out during the hearings, the collection of administrative fines should be dealt exclusively with employees of the public service of bailiffs. However, their workload (500-600 cases per month) led to the fact that the Ministry of Internal Affairs employees joined the procedure in the form of voluntary assistance as part of the operation “Frontier”. 50% of administrative fines for traffic violations go to a special account of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The plans of the responsible committee are to hold another hearing. This time it concerns point system of fines for violations of the Rules of the road.