When listening to the NA delegate E. Marukyan (P. Ghazaryan’s guest), a lawyer by training, once again I got the impression that citizens are ostensibly deprived of the right to dispute the decisions on paying fines for breaking the RTR (Road Traffic Rules) in court. Moreover, that was presented as the biggest “tragedy”. Gevorg Danielyan, the president of the Centre of Constitutional Rights NGO Council, former Minister of Justice, wrote about this on his Facebook page.
First, I would like to note that it’s not true. They can appeal. Besides, the main “problem” is not the procedure of going to court at all. There are a lot more critical problems that we need to be concerned with. Ultimately, one is not prohibited to dispute any administrative act on his own. It’s just that it used to be done on the initiative of an administrative body before and it didn’t matter whether there was a dispute in the middle of it or not. Apart from this, the current system, given its legal regulations, is not different from the international expertise. Therefore, this is a false piece of information that is far from reality, whereas the real problems are, as follows:
a) The amount of fine should be proportionate to the property status of the person. In accordance with international expertise, for the same legal offense the amount of fine can be estimated 2,000 AMD for one person and 200,000 AMD for another.
b) It is needed to clearly determine the grounds on warning a person instead of fining him/her. For instance, in cases when the person has not broken any RTR for at least 3 months.
c) A decided part of the collected money needs to be allocated to the improvement of roads.
d) Exclude the possibility of enforcing the decision on an administrative penalty without giving the person an opportunity to explain himself/herself.
e) Thoroughly review the “proper notice” procedure and make it truly realistic by applying one-time alternatives (SMS or Email, document notifications to the address specified by the person, etc.).
f) Refrain from the expertise of not fining the corporate car drivers who are not on duty at the moment, remove the so-called “state numbers” from circulation for good as only common license plates are accepted in the international expertise.
g) Law-abiding drivers’ property taxes and MSIV (Mandatory State Insurance of Vehicles) fees should be significantly reduced, etc.
I would like to add that I have made official announcements on these approaches during my time as a minister. Therefore, I expect that no speculations will be made on this matter. All in all, the problem is not on the court platform at all. Instead, we should try to find solutions to more urgent issues.
Iravaban.net
