Remarks on the Tightening of Liability for Certain Traffic Offences

Abstract

The author discusses the nature and scope of changes introduced to the Code of Petty Offences and the Code of Procedure in Petty Offences Cases by the act of December 2, 2021. The amendment represents a far-reaching intervention by the legislator in the current legal status regarding offences against safety and order in transportation. It foresees quite significant modifications in terms of the legal-criminal response to them, transformations of the characteristics of selected types of prohibited acts, as well as propose entirely new types of prohibited acts. From the conducted analysis, it appears that the guiding thought behind the above changes is primarily to increase the degree of punitiveness of the petty offences law towards the perpetrators of traffic violations. Such a legislative approach naturally raises concerns about the instrumental use of the petty offences law with respect to the perpetrators of these kinds of offences. The adopted direction of changes raises suspicions that the legislator has not thoroughly familiarized themselves with the matter covered by their intervention. In any case, it does not find grounding in the current state of traffic criminality, or in the analysis of judicial practice. An increase in repressiveness has never directly translated into a reduction in traffic criminality. The latter is indeed a much more complex problem, involving the necessity of multi-faceted references.