Notifications on administrative fines are a very controversial topic. Lawyers are sure about this.
Lawyer Davit Asatryan has told Iravaban.net that frequent are the cases when people are fined with an administrative act the notice of which they have not received.
In the lawyer’s words, the administrative act comes into force in two stages of notification. The first one is formal and the second one is legal. “The formal stage comes into force if the person receives notice, while the legal one comes into force after two months, that is to say, when the administrative act becomes indisputable,” said the lawyer adding that this process needs to be formulated in a legally clear way.
According to the lawyer, “If there is no state evidence that the driver has received notice then the administrative act does not exist, and the state representatives don’t have a right to apply to the Judicial Acts Compulsory Enforcement Service.” Moreover, this service is bound by the 88th article of the law on the Principles of Administration and Administrative Proceedings where it is clearly specified that:
“If the JACE does not manage to find evidence, proceedings on the case must not begin and the recipient must not be charged,” noted the lawyer.
Nevertheless, according to him, one should not ignore the flip side of the medal, too. “Let’s face the facts: The JACE employee, who receives 400-500 judicial acts on a daily basis, is not able to observe the formal stage of the enforcement of each administrative act. In most cases, during the JACE inquiries aimed at finding out whether or not the service has received the evidence, we have never come across a case when they gave a positive answer and let us check out the evidence. There is never any evidence on an administrative act being enforced or being notified about. There has never been a case like that. In fact, due to human resources, it can never happen,” noted our interlocutor, concluding that the mechanism introduced by the state as a compensation in order to bypass the constitutional property right does not work.
Lawyer Vahe Astvatsatryan says that in order not to have any serious problems with notices, drivers need to notify the RP in case of changing their address.
Why is the problem with notices relevant today? The lawyer gave a number of explanations to that. First of all, he spoke about the exaggerated notion of powers of attorney or, as drivers put it in Russian, “generalny daverennest”.
“In order to drive a car, sell it or do something else with it, the owner gives the necessary authorizations to another person. Oftentimes people have the warped opinion that the authorization means that the car is already sold. Many citizens have sold their cars using such authorizations but, from the perspective of law, they have just given some powers to the buyers. I believe that problems with notices mostly emerge because of these authorizations,” said the lawyer.
Taking all of this into account, he does not blame the RP noting that drivers should be aware of their rights. Therefore, in order to avoid further complications, the lawyer suggests that the drivers sign their sales agreements properly, deregister their cars and register them on the new owners’ names. That way the problem will be completely solved.
Gevorg Tosunyan
