Filenews 11 July 2023
A year and a half has passed since the day the photo-tagging system with traffic cameras was implemented and to this day not a single case of offenders who did not pay their bill has been registered in the Court.
According to police data, at the moment 40% of extrajudicial notices mailed and received have not been paid. We may be talking about more than 40,000 cases with rough calculations and the system is still in phase A. When the system with 90 fixed cameras and 20 mobile cameras is fully implemented at the end of the year, one can imagine the volume of cases that will end up in the courts.
As reported to "F" by the Police, there were initially some problems that had to be solved between the Traffic Police and the contractor company that manages the system. They mainly concerned the identification of the driver so that one is not prosecuted and it is another driver. Problems also arose for companies, since the system did not recognize the driver of a vehicle belonging to a company.
At the same time, an issue that needed to be resolved concerned who would prepare the indictments to be sent to court.
All these issues, as we have been duly told, have largely been overcome and in a short time the first 2,000-3,000 cases will be registered in the courts. According to the procedure, the contractor company will send all information about the offender and the violation to the Police (Traffic Police) and after identification, then the data will be forwarded to the relevant police station for preparation and registration of the file at the registry of the relevant district. The indictment will then be served on the offender, as is the case with other traffic offense cases.
The fear of those responsible is that when the flow of cases begins, the courts, which are already overcrowded and postpone the hearing of traffic cases for more than two years, will be drowned.
Another issue that arose and was resolved by the opinion of the Legal Service concerns the issue of the deadline for payment of a fine. According to the original legislation, an extrajudicial document had to be delivered within a certain period of time. However, this legislation has already been amended and the Legal Service has ensured that even if this period has elapsed, there is no question of locating and handing over any registered document, be it a fine or a letter.
Those involved were also concerned with the issue of extrajudicial cases that have not been received by offenders. While the relevant notice has been sent by post, however, a large portion of drivers deliberately did not go to collect them and as a result they are pending. Also, there is a category of citizens who for practical reasons (changed address, were sick or absent) did not receive the relevant notification.
For them, the fine is not time-barred and a special electronic list is already being created so that when these persons attempt to travel, or contact the Police for any reason, they can be identified and served with the extrajudicial document.
According to data, from 1/1/2022 until 17/5/2023, 213,603 traffic violations were recorded by the cameras and 181,920 have been mailed. Of these, only 67,362 have been paid out of court.
