FOREIGN DRIVERS who break traffic laws when they travel in Ireland will no longer be able to avoid prosecution under new European legislation proposed yesterday.
The European Commission said the law could save 5,000 lives every year in the EU if it persuaded all non-resident drivers to follow the rules when they travel abroad.
The draft EU directive aims at beefing up the enforcement powers of national authorities to ensure they can track down and prosecute traffic offenders.
It would create an electronic data-exchange to enable authorities to track down offenders when they return to their home country after committing an offence abroad.
The system works by enabling judicial authorities to search the 27 national car-registration databases in Europe to find the name and address of offenders.
Once identified, they would be sent notice of a fine by post in the driver's own language.
"Foreign traffic offenders are rarely sanctioned because all they have to do is cross the border, go back home, and they escape," said transport commissioner Jacques Barrot at the presentation of the directive. "This leads to a feeling of insecurity and injustice among the public, who are less disposed to toeing the line themselves."
The scale of the problem is highlighted by Irish statistics which show that 7 per cent of all serious traffic accidents in 2006 involved non-resident drivers. The large number of Northern Ireland-registered drivers on the roads in the Republic and significant migration from new EU states such as Poland contributed to this figure.
The situation in transit countries in continental Europe is worse. In Luxembourg, 30 per cent of speeding offences are perpetrated by non-residents.
The draft EU directive, which must still be agreed by EU states and the European Parliament, initially will only deal with the four core traffic offences: driving when drunk; speeding; non-use of seat belts; and breaking a red light.
These offences make up three-quarters of all traffic offences committed in the EU.
Up until now foreign drivers caught speeding in another EU state have been able to avoid punishment unless they were issued with on-the-spot fines. Automatic speed cameras often cannot read foreign number plates, and even when they can, with authorities unable to access other states' records, they often cannot locate a driver that has committed an offence in their jurisdiction.
The EU estimates it could cost €140 million to upgrade road-safety equipment in all 27 states to enable the new electronic data-exchange to work properly. However its impact assessment says that if the policy succeeds in saving 5,000 lives it represents a benefit in socio-economic terms of €5 billion per year.
For the policy to work, however, Mr Barrot said governments would have to implement an existing EU framework decision proposed in 2005 on the mutual recognition of financial penalties.
So far just seven EU states have implemented the law, which was supposed to be implemented by March 2007. Ireland has not implemented the law even though it supports the EU's drive to cut road deaths.
The European Transport and Safety Council, which campaigns on road safety issues, welcomed the proposal yesterday.
"The proposal will, hopefully, bring an end to this flagrant disregard for traffic rules and make them equally enforceable throughout the EU. Research shows that it is sustained and intensive enforcement that has a long-lasting effect on driver behaviour," said the council's spokesman.