MPs want to fine passengers who are not wearing seat belts
The fine is to be UAH 510, the same as that paid by vehicle drivers for this violation.
The Verkhovna Rada registered the draft law “On Amendments to Article 121 of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses and Other Legislative Acts of Ukraine on the Safety of Vehicle Operation” No. 9210-1 of May 01, 2023. In it, MPs Oleksandr Tkachenko and Antonina Slavytska propose to increase fines for violating a number of traffic rules and regulations, especially to justify corrupt certification of vehicles.
In particular, they plan to bring passengers to justice. If they do not use seat belts in cars or helmets on motorcycles, they will also be fined UAH 510. Currently, police can only issue a fine to drivers of vehicles.
A repeat offense will result in a fine of UAH 1700 or forced labor for up to forty hours. However, this article also provides for the seizure of the vehicle, but it is not clear how this penalty applies to the owner of the car if the passenger violated the traffic rules.
However, the main and most confusing part of this draft law does not concern passengers at all, but is aimed at cementing such a rudiment of Ukrainian motorists’ lives as vehicle certification. Despite the fact that a draft law on canceling the certification of those cars that have the relevant EU document has recently been registered in the parliament, the above-mentioned MPs are trying to increase the dependence of domestic car owners on this corrupt system. They justify this by claiming that the certification system includes 15 so-called certification bodies, which allegedly employ thousands of Ukrainians – this is what the explanatory note to this draft law states. However, it does not mention that millions of car owners are forced to pay them thousands of hryvnias for the dubious service of issuing unnecessary certificates.
MPs Tkachenko and Slavytska explain the need to pass the bill by saying that “one of the causes of road accidents and their grave consequences is driving vehicles that have significant technical malfunctions, are unauthorized or technically poorly converted, do not meet the manufacturer’s technical parameters, etc.” However, they do not indicate that such reasons led to only 0.2% of accidents with victims (National Police statistics for 2022), and this figure has been stable for a long time.
Despite this far-fetched reason, MPs want to increase the responsibility of car owners for operating vehicles without certificates of conformity. Although no law or bylaw obliges a driver to keep such a document (it is issued at the first registration of a car in Ukraine and stored at the Service Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), the MPs propose to fine a car owner for their absence by 680 UAH for the first time and twice as much for a repeated so-called “violation”.
The draft law contains many more such “inaccuracies,” so there is hope that the relevant committee and the parliament’s legal service will “bury” it among hundreds of similar drafts in the wilds of the Verkhovna Rada’s archives.
