EC seeks to prosecute foreign drivers

The European Commission has adopted a new road safety directive that will allow for cross-border prosecution of driving offences.

The Commission said it is proposed that measures will be introduced to enable police forces to identify and prosecute motorists who break the law in EU states other than the one where their vehicle is registered.

Until now, unless offenders are issued with on-the-spot fines they largely escape prosecution.

The directive will cover four traffic offences: speeding, drink-driving, failure to wear a seatbelt and failure to obey traffic lights. The Commission says these a factors in 75 per cent of all road deaths within the European Union.

It says it wants the establishment of a Europe-wide network for the electronic exchange of data on driving offences. There are very few instances of such exchanges among EU memberstates at present.

"This will make an appreciable difference to road safety in Europe by bringing about a positive change of behaviour in both non-resident and resident drivers," the Commission said. "It will also end the unequal treatment which often exists between these two groups of road users."

In Ireland, almost seven per cent of all serious traffic accidents in 2006 involved non-resident drivers, many of them from Northern Ireland.

A spokesman for the Road Safety Authority said it "welcomed the new directive".

The European Traffic Safety Council also said the new  directive was necessary. "Although a number of bi-lateral agreements exist, there has been no common EU approach so far to tackle non-resident drivers who believe they are above the law," an ETSC spokeswoman said.

She said many drivers are more likely to take risks and break the law with "impunity" when they are abroad. She said statistics show non-resident drivers are three times as likely to break the law as residents, while 15 per cent of all speeding offences in the EU are committed by foreign motorists.

"The proposal will hopefully bring an end to this flagrant disregard for traffic rules and make them equally enforceable throughout the EU," she added.

The Commission set a target in 2001, when there were 54,000 road deaths across the EU, of halving fatalities by 2010. Last year was the first since 2001 when there was no reduction in the number of fatalities.

A total of 43,000 people died on the EU's roads last year, the equivalent to five medium-sized passenger aircraft crashing in Europe every week, a EC spokesman said.