The Russian Government has submitted to the State Duma a bill envisaging that transport vehicles of foreign carriers could be detained on the Russian territory in cases of violation of the national traffic rules, according to the database of the lower house of parliament.
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Respective amendments are proposed to be made in the Code of Administrative Offenses.
Currently, there is no possibility to prohibit foreign vehicles leaving the territory of the Russian Federation until the fines imposed on such vehicles because of traffic rules violations are collected. This is the reason for the low collection of fines.
In particular, in 2020, officers of the Federal Service for Supervision in the Transport Sphere (Rostransnadzor) imposed fines on foreign carriers for violations of the procedure for international road transport in the amount of 588 million rubles (about $8 million at the current exchange rate), but could collect only 405 million rubles ($5.5 million), that is, 68%, the authors of the initiative point out.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in 2020 officers of the State Traffic Inspectorate could, not including violations registered with the use of photo and video recording means, reveal 783,000 traffic violations committed by drivers while driving vehicles with foreign registration plates, 730,000 respective decisions were issued, but only 477,000 of those were executed.
It should be noted that in order to identify administrative offenses in the field of road traffic, special technical means, which have the functions of photographing and filming, as well as video recording, and operate in automatic mode, have since recently been actively used.
If an offense is detected with the help of photo and video recording, according to the Code of Administrative Offenses, the owners of such vehicles are to be brought to responsibility.
As such incidents are registered during transportation, the measure is to be applied with respect of the carriers, that is, not individuals, but legal entities. The mechanism of bringing foreign legal entities to administrative responsibility for offenses recorded in the automatic mode is not implemented in practice, since there is no legal representative of the legal entity on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Thus, in relation to foreigners, in practice, only the driver who is an individual may be brought to administrative responsibility when the vehicle is stopped directly by the officers of the regulatory authorities.
But even in this case, officers of regulatory authorities can only register the fact that an offense was commited and impose a fine, since the Code of Administrative Offenses does not provide for the detention of a foreign vehicle until the payment of such a fine for each and every type of administrative violations, the authors of the bill explain.
As a result, offenders’ vehicles may freely leave the territory of Russia without paying a fine, according to the authors of the document.
The Russian Transport Ministry has developed a draft federal law that provides for the purpose of ensuring that foreign carriers are unswervingly brought to administrative responsibility in the event of committing of administrative offenses under the Code of Administrative Offences by vehicles belonging to foreign carriers, by the way of detaining such vehicles with the use of blocking devices until the payment of an administrative fine, the explanatory note to the bill reads. ■