The Constitutional Court stood up for the Kazakh motorist: a tricky dispute about rights

As it turned out, driving licenses of a number of countries are valid in Russia without time limits.

A resident of Khabarovsk managed to defend his right not to pay a fine. The Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that a Khabarovsk citizen was needlessly punished for driving his car without a Russian driver’s license.

As it became known to MK, the motorist moved to Khabarovsk and became a Russian citizen in August 2017, before that he was a citizen of Kazakhstan. It was in this country that he received his rights in 2013 and calmly used them even after changing citizenship. There were no problems until June 25, 2019, when the traffic police inspector issued him a fine of 5,000 rubles for driving a vehicle without a license. The citizen went to court. However, the decision of the judge of the Khabarovsk Industrial District Court, issued in September 2019, disappointed the motorist: the traffic police decision was left unchanged. The driver insisted that not a single document indicated the period during which foreign rights should be replaced with Russian ones, but his arguments were declared untenable. In issuing such a verdict, the court was guided by the provisions of the law “On Road Safety” and the Convention on Road Traffic, concluded in Vienna on November 8, 1968 and signed by both Russia and Kazakhstan. Russian law allows you to drive a car with only foreign rights, but the convention says that driver’s licenses issued in the country that signed the document are valid in the territory of another signatory country only until the moment when this country becomes the usual place of residence of the owner of the rights. Since an international treaty takes precedence in this case, the court indicated that only those who temporarily reside on its territory can drive vehicles in Russia with a valid foreign driver’s license.

But the Khabarovsk resident did not give up: the case was considered in the Khabarovsk Regional Court, the Ninth Court of Cassation of General Jurisdiction, and, finally, in the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. Judges of all instances recognized the fine and the subsequent verdict of the district court as lawful. There was only hope for the Constitutional Court. The driver argued that the provision of the law, in the sense given to it by law enforcement practice, contradicts several articles of the Constitution, in particular, the articles guaranteeing the right to move and to use one’s private property. The court noted that the Russian regulatory documents do not directly indicate the need to exchange a foreign national driver’s license for a Russian one and do not indicate the terms of the exchange. As a result, the Constitutional Court recognized the provision of the law, on the basis of which the fine was issued, as inconsistent with the Basic Law. Therefore, decisions made in other judicial instances should be reviewed.