Sparks Project - Legal Research

Recommendations

New European legislation is the most effective way to increase foreign registered vehicles’ compliance with UK civil traffic laws, according to legal academics working on the Eurosparks research project.

In their findings the experts – from the UK, Germany, Italy, France and The Netherlands - recommend that the European Union introduces a new directive within the EC Treaty.

Alternatives are an extension of the council framework decision known as COPEN24 to cover decriminalised civil offences, or member states forming bilateral or multilateral treaties covering mutual enforcement.

A New Directive

The team’s preferred recommendation is adoption of a new directive under Article 71 of the European Union Treaty that would facilitate enforcement of traffic penalties across borders. Article 71 has a broad scope across the field of European transport policy and already supports road transport legislation from different perspectives.

The directive would enable enforcement across borders of financial penalties arising from violation of minor traffic laws including parking, bus lane, traffic restriction and congestion charging. Key tenets would include:

Flexibility to be adapted to local conditions within member states
Application to specified minor traffic offences no matter how they are classified in an individual member state
No objections based on different classifications in the issuing and enforcing states
Enforcement through usual procedures in the enforcing state
Receipts from the proceedings to be received by the judgment debtor from the issuing state
Data sharing authorised specifically for the purposes of enforcement
Compliance with European standards on human rights, the rule of law, safeguards for defaulters and proportionality
Provision for enforcement practices, time limits and transmission of payments.

Extending COPEN24

The legal research team’s second recommendation, should a new directive prove unattainable, is to extend Council Framework Decision 2005/214/JHA on the application of the principle of mutual recognition to financial penalties, known as COPEN24, to cover all traffic violations both minor and serious.

Currently this framework decision only applies to criminal offences, providing an enforcement mechanism after a financial penalty has been imposed but no data transfer arrangements to identify owners or drivers. Monies recovered accrue to the enforcing state and costs are not reclaimable, unless agreed in advance between the issuing and enforcing states.

It could be an effective solution with the following changes:

Decriminalised offences deemed as criminal for the operation of COPEN24
Provision for the enforcement of judgments in another state by bodies that are not prosecuting authorities, such as local authorities
Straightforward provisions for the transfer of data
Sharing of monies and costs between issuing and enforcing states
Implementation in all member states.

Bilateral Treaties

Should neither of their first two recommendations be accepted by the European Commission, the Eurosparks legal research team see only one alternative – member states developing bilateral and multilateral treaties that provide:

A framework for mutual enforcement of uncontested penalties imposed by courts or administrative bodies
Protection for offenders consistent with the European Convention of Human Rights
Mechanisms for the transfer of personal owner and vehicle data.

Bipartite agreements between a small number of sympathetic partners could potentially be agreed and ratified within 12 to 18 months from initial discussions. But the subject matter would need to be restricted to data sharing, mutual recognition and enforcement of traffic violations.

A multipartite treaty that established a framework for enforcing administrative violations, including those considered civil in England and Wales, would be far more ambitious and involve negotiations over many years as well as ratification by national parliaments.

An abstract of the legal research was published following the final Eurosparks seminar in January 2008. It is available in the following languages: