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The Constitutional Court ratified the ruling of last February that It took away the responsibility of the photo fines from the owner of the vehicle, if this was not the one who was driving it.
The confirmation of the high court comes after the Executive Director of the Colombian Federation of Municipalities and the Mayor’s Office of Medellín will present a request for annulment for the alleged disclosure and irregular publication of the judgment and the presumed incongruity between the motive and resolution part of the same.
First of all, in response, the Court recalled that its jurisprudence has recognized that the declaration of nullity of the judgments “It is an exceptional and rigorous mechanism, which is not designed so that those who are dissatisfied with the decision adopted by the corporation use such a procedure to reopen the debates already exhausted, to the point that they question the grounds of a sentence that acquired legal force of the constitutional res judicata ”.
So things, the high court determined that the grounds for nullity set forth do not satisfy the requirement of sufficient argumentation.
“In relation to the presumed inconsistency between the motive and resolution part of the same, the high court considered that of said charge it is not possible to carry out a substantive examination regarding the validity of the sentence. Reason for which the annulment requests based on the previous arguments will be rejected, for not satisfying the argumentative load necessary to discuss the validity of the judgments delivered by the Court, ”reads a statement issued by the Constitutional Court.
Accordingly, the discussion was closed and the responsibility for the fine was in the hands of the drivers of the vehicles and not of the owners.
The foregoing, because the Court considered that the joint and several liability of the vehicle owner for the payment of the fine imposed for a traffic violation generated uncertainty about the respect of constitutional guarantees.
The Court explained that by proceeding in this way, the responsibility and guilt are omitted by making the owner of the vehicle directly responsible.; The principle of personal responsibility is unknown and the presumption of innocence is violated by not requiring the traffic authority to prove that the offense was committed with guilt.
Feasibility of the sentence
One of the debates that opens the order of the Court is how will determine who will pay the photofine, since not all security cameras manage to capture and identify who is the person who committed the offense.
According to the Vice Minister of Transport, Carmen Ligia Valderrama, Yes, there is a difficulty in identifying the person responsible for the payment of the infraction. “In some cases it can be identified, but there is the difficulty and it will be the owner who must claim that he was not driving the vehicle. The photodetection systems will hardly be able to detect who were those who were driving ”, acknowledged the deputy minister in dialogue with Blu Radio.
However, he stressed that the sentence declares the nullity of an article of the law, but the entire photodetection system is still in force. “What was defined is that if a person other than the owner of the vehicle commits the offense, he cannot be charged.”
Impunity?
For the mobility expert Fernando Rojas, one of the effects left by the Court’s decision is the “feeling of impunity for violators of traffic signals.”
Rojas explained: “As the driver cannot be identified, it could happen that someone says: ‘I’m not the owner and I don’t care, I do whatever I want on the road. ‘ This could create chaos in mobility ”.
On the other hand, the mobility expert pointed out that the decision could affect those municipal and local administrations that invested in photo fines and that do not have the ability to clearly identify the driver of the vehicle with which the offense is committed.
“In this sense, a large legal vacuum is generated, to the extent that it will be necessary to review whether this cannot be declared as a patrimonial detriment for the officials who made the decision ”, he specified.
Thus, what the expert recommended is that in order for a counterweight to be generated before the judicial decision of the high court, systems could be chosen, such as the one used in Brazil, that allow the owner of the car to challenge the photocomparendo that comes to him. your home and can be attributed to the person who was driving, because it could affect, for example, the points of your driver’s license.
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