Traffic cameras are asked for more rights – Newspaper Kommersant No. 52 (7497) dated 03/28/2023

Regional authorities are asked to change the rules that hinder the wider use of traffic cameras to monitor violations. On Monday, as part of a profile event, the Federation Council made proposals to increase the statute of limitations for bringing violators to justice from two months to a year, to return the practice of fines for exceeding the average speed on a section of the road, and to oblige the police to provide the regional authorities with the TIN and passport data of the owners by the state number of the car .

The Federation Council Committee on State Construction on Monday presented a summary analysis of the practice of using cameras in the regions. The document is devoted to the problems that the authorities face and how to solve them.

Most of the problems are related to fixing the norms established by regional laws, followed from the speech of the Executive Secretary of the Committee’s Expert Advisory Council Vakhtang Fedorov. In particular, we are talking about a ban on parking on the lawn, on playgrounds, non-payment for parking, etc. The subjects complain about the difficulties in obtaining personal data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of citizens according to the license plate of the car: the police do not always share the data necessary for issuing resolutions – for this you need information exchange agreements. Sometimes, Vakhtang Fedorov explained, there are delays in the process of interdepartmental interaction, due to which the statute of limitations for bringing to justice expires. Today, this period is two months for fines imposed on the basis of data from cameras. The subjects of the federation propose to increase it to a year, said Vakhtang Fedorov. A number of regions, in his words, propose to oblige the Ministry of Internal Affairs to provide the TIN, series and passport number of car owners for sending this information to bailiffs.

Another problem that regional officials complain about is the lack of the right of “authorized persons” (including police officers) to cancel already issued fines on their own, for example, in case of camera errors.

This requires a citizen’s complaint or a prosecutor’s protest. The subjects of the federation propose to amend the Code of Administrative Offenses in this regard. It should be noted that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has been promoting this initiative for a long time as part of the preparation of a new Code of Administrative Offenses. The document has been developed in the Ministry of Justice since 2019, but has not yet been submitted to the State Duma.

There are also proposals to return fines for exceeding the average speed. Such a practice recall, the traffic police canceled in 2021 after criticism of the Supreme Court. Since then, the subjects of the federation at various sites have been seeking the return of this type of punishment as an effective way to reduce the accident rate. On Monday, this was again stated by Deputy Head of the Moscow Region Ministry of Transport Vitaly Rezanov, as well as the Executive Director of the OKO Association (which unites camera manufacturers) Eldar Tuzmukhametov. The latter also proposed introducing the right for regions to install cameras not only after a series of accidents (as is happening now), but also “preventively” – in places where a high accident rate is only predicted. To do this, it is necessary to change the methodology of the Ministry of Transport of Russia for the installation of complexes.

The results of the meeting will be used in “legislative work in the field of improving the use of photo and video recording,” Senator Alexander Bashkin promised on Monday.

The lawyer of the “Freedom of Choice” movement Serhiy Radko was skeptical about the idea of ​​extending the statute of limitations for bringing to justice. “Obtaining information from the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the presence of interdepartmental electronic document management is a matter of several minutes,” he explained to Kommersant. “If this information is received in paper form, then a year may not be enough. Moreover, the one-year statute of limitations gives the law enforcer the feeling that everything will be done in time. The work is either not done at all, or at one point in a hurry they begin to consider cases for which deadlines are burning. Presenting the TIN and passport data is also not a good idea, Mr. Radko believes. “This information is too important to expand access to collect relatively small fines,” he said. “There is a risk of leaking this data to the black market.”

The idea to install cameras “preventively” in places where a high accident rate is predicted is conceptually correct, says Petr Shkumatov, coordinator of the Blue Buckets movement.

“But I’m afraid that they will be installed in those places where it is beneficial in terms of collecting fines,” he says. Alexei Grishkovets, a professor at the Institute of Law and State of the Russian Academy of Sciences, spoke about the problem of “commercialization” of complexes on Monday, speaking at the Federation Council: many regions, he said, perceive cameras as a way to replenish the treasury and even predict penalty income in the budget in advance.

Ivan Buranov